Collective security agreements allow many countries's politicians to shift the cost of national defense to taxpayers outside their own countries. Moral hazard, belligerence, and over-reliance on military solutions often ensue.
American revolutionaries revolted in part over high tariffs, but the new American state immediately began raising tariffs after the revolution, and tariffs have played an important role in American wars, imperialism, and crony capitalism ever since.
After 1910, Germany increasingly relied on fiat money to pay the bills. It wasn't just the Treaty of Versailles that eventually led to hyperinflation, but an all-too-common policy of turning to inflationary monetary policy.
The quasi-gold standard promoted by Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames in their new book has more in common with the Bretton Woods system than with the classical gold standard.
Austerity is nothing more than allowing the private sector more control over what it produces. Those who argue against austerity are claiming that government will more wisely spend, invest, and save than private persons and firms.
Economics Nobel Prize winner Jean Tirole still clings to the old neoclassical model "perfect competition" and monopoly, in which there is no place for entrepreneurship, and which fails to grasp that consumers benefit more from a diversity of goods than a diversity of firms.
Tom Woods and Mateusz Machaj discuss the problem with John Taylor's rule for monetary policy.
A recent study shows that one's political views are now the most widespread source of discrimination and conflict in American society. Politics is now more important than ever because the state is more powerful than ever.
Liberty-loving people are right to be appalled by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. However, just about every evil in the legislation has already been inflicted on the market through fifty years of state destruction of the healthcare market.
Robert Murphy explains why people trade goods, and the role of money.
