It is commonplace in American media and among so-called economists to conflate “inflation” with relative price increases. While changes in prices due to market volatility do add to the general calculations of price indexes, the conflation hides the true causes of increasing prices, leading to two nefarious outcomes. Misguided government policies and misinformed public perception.
Today is Veterans Day. It’s a day when politicians like to give speeches praising the extraordinary courage and selflessness of America’s veterans and active-duty military personnel.
It’s also a day when American military history is often treated like a vague, homogeneous blob of sacrifice. But it’s worth getting a bit more specific.
We celebrate on November 11 because that’s the day, back in 1918, when World War I ended. It was famously the day when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Last Sunday, on the TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes, President Donald Trump told his interviewer that he’d like to work with the Democrats to pass legislation giving illegal aliens a path to legal status in the United States. In other words, Trump is now saying he favors making a deal to enact some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens.
There is much commentary purporting to explain the recent French riots. (I write this article on October 24, 2026). But so far I have seen no explanation that attempts to lay at least part of the blame to faulty economic theory. I will attempt to do that here.
Editor’s note: This article first appeared on LewRockwell.com on July 12, 2005.
If you haven’t seen this, it is really an outrage.
Digital surveillance promises to make institutions more secure by enabling them to see more. Automated license-plate readers, facial recognition systems, and interconnected databases allow authorities to identify patterns and retrieve information at speeds once considered impossible. Yet greater capacity to detect and classify does not necessarily improve the ability to determine what happened. An institution may acquire more information without gaining the ability to interpret it accurately.
The recent reaction in the gold market to the September US inflation data offers a textbook illustration of how short-term speculative noise can obscure and distort longer-term realities. After the CPI print showed a 0.6 percent month-on-month rise and 3.7 percent year-on-year, followed by an even hotter PPI of 1.3 percent monthly and 6.3 percent annually, spot gold sold off sharply. Prices briefly tested levels near $4,070–$4,100 before recovering most of the ground.
