Mises Daily

A perpetual and unlimited debt brings the cheapening of money and then inflation, whereby the middle class is economically murdered in its sleep. 

Venezuela is one of the most economically unfree countries in the world, and it has one of the highest crime rates in the world. Unfortunately, President Maduro thinks he can fix the problem by making the country even less free than it is now. 

Abstinence would be tantamount to this notice to politicians: since we as individuals have decided to look after our affairs, your services are no longer needed. Having assumed social power we must, as individuals, assume social responsibility — provided, of course, the politicians accept their discharge.

With European powers broke and economically ailing by 1916, World War One would have ended much sooner had the Federal Reserve and its cronies not stepped in to help England and France keep the bloodshed going. Meanwhile, US economic intervention led to a huge post-war bust in America. 

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.