Critics of the free market often claim that capitalism is a system of ruthless struggle for survival. They say it is a system of dog-eat-dog competition. In fact, as the great Ludwig von Mises argued in an unanswerable way, the free market replaces the struggle for survival found in the animal world with social cooperation in which everybody benefits. Capitalism is a system of peace, not war.
In the previous article, I discussed the social consequences of the welfare state; now I want to focus on inflation—or more precisely, on central bank policy. Inflation can broadly be defined as an artificial increase in the money supply that ultimately drives up prices, but this definition overlooks the fact that it is a process in which prices first rise in the capital goods of industries furthest from final consumption and then gradually spread throughout the entire system.
MAGA wants a single man to be able to raise taxes without any checks on this power. Fortunately, the courts disagreed.
While Austrian economists from Ludwig von Mises to Henry Hazlitt to Murray Rothbard have dealt with the various fallacies that John Maynard Keynes laid out in The General Theory and other works—and they are legion—only Rothbard chose to deal with the philosophical/moral aspects of Keynes’s viewpoints in Keynes, the Man, and he finds that these viewpoints indeed influenced his economic thinki
This article is adapted from a lecture at the 2025 Revisionist History of War Confernece at the Mises Institite.
When America’s regime historians reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they always praise Pax Americana. That is the idea that American hegemony brought peace to the world.
Conveniently, they leave out the horrors of it.
War finance is in the Federal Reserve’s DNA. As Ron Paul astutely noted, “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” The Fed itself acknowledges that its primary objective during WWI and WWII was to finance the massive spending during these wars.
Consider this FOMC memo from 2016:
Markets are figuring out that Trump’s tariff “negotiations” are just political theater, with no real end game or plan.
