In his recent article targeting the collapse of the FTX exchange, Ryan McMaken noted that the easy money regime we have lived under for more than two decades has led to yet another bubble with a spectacular crash. Enron and WorldCom blew up in the wake of the first bubble; Lehman Brothers and other investment banks and Wall Street firms went down in the 2008 collapse of the infamous housing bubble.
Does America simply lack the political will to face economic reality?
In the teeth of the Depression, Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon famously told President Herbert Hoover to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate”—in other words, to resist bailing out any industry through state intervention. This was a tough sell even in those days, and of course Hoover succumbed to politics and took the opposite approach, greatly and needlessly damaging the US economy for decades to come.
Ludwig von Mises published Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus in 1922 (translated into English as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 1951). In more than five hundred pages, the most prominent representative of the Austrian school offers a comprehensive and deep analysis of the “socialist phenomenon.”
The yearly growth rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell to 7.7 percent in October from 8.2 percent in September. Note that in October 2021 the yearly growth rate stood at 6.2 percent. Some experts are of the view that it is quite likely that the momentum of the CPI might have peaked.
On January 18, 1871, the German Empire was established after a seven-year conflict to unite the German confederacies. Prussia, a northern German state on the Baltic Sea would be the nation to unite Germany under a central ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm I. The central bank of Prussia, the “Reichsbank,” would assume control on January 1, 1876. While the gold standard was adopted after the reunification wars in 1871, the Reichsbank would adopt a “gold” mark as the universal German currency.
In recent decades, proposals for a universal basic income (UBI) have aroused a good deal of attention, but supporters of the free market have for the most part been averse to the idea. In his article “A Hayekian Case for Free Markets and a Universal Basic Income” (in Michael Cholbi and Michael Weber, eds., The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income [Routledge, 2020], pp. 7–26), the philosopher Matt Zwolinski has made a good case that free-market supporters should endorse a UBI, but I’m not convinced.
