Was it just a Freudian slip that Greenspand started his recent encomium for Keynesian debasement with a reference to the Gold standard? It was probably inadvertent, but the contrast suggested between real, hard money, freely chosen by market processes, not arbitrarily by the State and its Financiers, was no less resonant for the fact that it was implicit, rather than as shockingly explicit as in Bernanke's recent speech on the subject.
Following Lott's public flogging, many people were astonished by the Senator's willingness to jettison all political principle for the sake of saving his status as Majority Leader. Why would a conservative Republican suddenly find himself embracing the full panoply of the left-wing racial agenda and criticize himself so mercilessly?
By defaulting on one loan, Argentina may be acknowledging that no country ever became wealthy depending on public financing organizations from another hemisphere. One can hope. Such ideas can lead to economic sovereignty and wealth creation. Such ideas, if spread, can cause industrial revolutions.
It is possible for mainstream equilibrium economics to yield correct conclusions about the market system. But this is not a reliable approach, writes D.W. MacKenzie. The mathematical models of mainstream economics divert our attention from the processes and institutions that enable free and prosperous societies to exist and persist.
Like all government operations (public schools, domestic security, tax collection), the Post Office has to continually reform itself to avoid a complete public-relations meltdown. Thus did the Post Office become the Postal Service some twenty years ago. The Bush administration plans yet another version of this cosmetic change.
The existence of the money multiplier is the outcome of fractional reserve banking, writes Frank Shostak, which the current banking system makes possible. The money multiplier is not only real; it is a good tool to help us understand the process by which the banking system creates inflationary credit and all of its associated effects.
Mencken is fashionable again, and the usual misunderstanding about his life and legacy are all back. Murray N. Rothbard points to the essential political orientation that helps makes sense of his relentless opposition to the welfare-warefare state: Mencken was a libertarian. This is Rothbard's classic study.
Given the economics of the cycle, writes Sean Corrigan, there are no easy choices. Standing the path of recovery are huge, perhaps unprecedented, imbalances, record indebtedness perched atop still-overblown asset prices, the ire of powerful vested interests, and a blind dedication to a whole pharmacopoeia of quack remedies and misdiagnoses.
Yes, people have been defrauded, and, yes, justice needs to be served. However, by pursuing people by using the vague and unjust RICO and "insider trading" laws, the politicians appeal not to our need for justice, but to the baser emotions of envy, resentment of wealthy people, and a gut-level desire to commit mayhem.
