The economic burden of inflation continues to ravage economies around the world. From the US to the UK to the eurozone, people are finding that the money in their wallets and bank accounts buys less and less every month. As with all problems, everyone is looking for three things: strategies, solutions, and scapegoats.
Murray Rothbard explained in Man, Economy, and State that praxeology is the “general, formal theory of human action” and that economics is the only subdivision of knowledge to have been fully elaborated by praxeological methods. However, he contended that those methods could be applied to other fields of study as well. Law, or legal theory, is perhaps one such field.
Matt McManus, a lecturer at the University of Michigan, has published in Jacobin an article under the less-than-engaging title “Ludwig von Mises Was a Free-Market Ideologue, Not a Hardheaded Thinker.” In the article, McManus raises some points of philosophical interest, but unfortunately his evident animus against Mises interferes with his understanding, sometimes to the point of outright distortion.
[The following is excerpted from remarks made at the Arizona Biltmore hotel this past weekend during the 2022 Mises Institute Supporters Summit]
Mainstream analysts seem convinced that global central banks are moving aggressively to tackle inflation, maybe even going too far. After having believed until recently that the spike in prices was only transitionary, central banks insist now that they will restore price stability at almost any cost. In September, the Fed raised its main interest rate to a range between 3 and 3.25 percent from close to zero at the beginning of the year.
Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America
by David E. Bernstein
186 pp.
Bombardier Books
Since I am an economist and my school year is not too far along, my classroom discussion of how all of economics traces back to the fact of scarcity (the combination of limited resources, which implies a limited ability to produce, along with wants that always exceed the amount that can be produced) facing everyone was quite recent.
Along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, Ben Bernanke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics today. The three have written extensively on the need to bail out the banks in times when the economy is in corrective mode, generally after a long period of monetary injections. Bernanke was Chairman of the Federal Reserve when he pushed for the latest round of bank bailouts in 2007-2009.
