What Chicago’s Mayor Gets Wrong about Private Security
After the recent spate of retail thefts and looting, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot chided businesses for not doing enough to protect themselves from theft. Fox 32 Chicago quotes her:
My Favorite Antiwar Protest: A Time of Mounted Park Police and “Free Speech Zones”
I’ve attended most of the major antiwar protests in Washington since 9/11. At a 2005 protest, a cop tried to whack me on the head with a wooden pole. At a 2007 protest, I snapped a picture showing George W. Bush hanging next to the US Capitol. But my favorite protest was a potent little ruckus that I almost missed.
Welcome to a New Chapter in the Latest Boom-Bust Cycle
What lies ahead is undoubtedly a rather sensitive chapter in the boom-and-bust-cycle drama caused by US monetary policy: the US Federal Reserve System (Fed) is about to end its ultraeasy course. The reason: after many years of exceptionally low interest rates—with most real, i.e., inflation-adjusted, interest rates even in the negative territory—and a huge inflow of newly created money to the economic and financial system, goods price inflation is rearing its ugly head.
Chapter 17: An Austrian Reaction to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy*
by Stephanie Kelton
New York: PublicAffairs, 2020, 336 pp.
Tom Woods on the Old Right
The Fed Is Hawkish Now? I’ll Believe It When I See It.
If you did any Fed watching this week, you probably heard all about how Jay Powell has turned (or perhaps returned) to hawkishness, and how the Federal Open Market Committee is all about fighting price inflation now.
Chapter 16: Bitcoin and the Theory of Money
In a modern primer on money mechanics, it is necessary to provide at least an introduction to Bitcoin.1 Consequently, in this chapter we will first give a basic explanation of what Bitcoin is and how it works.
Chapter 15: The “Market Monetarists” and NGDP Targeting
In addition to the Keynesian perspective (covered in chapter 14), a relatively new challenge to the Austrian framework comes from the “market monetarists” and their endorsement of a central bank policy of “level targeting” of nominal gross domestic product (sometimes abbreviated as NGDPLT1 ).
Chapter 14: Keynesians on the Cause of, and Cure for, Depressions
In chapter 8 we presented Ludwig von Mises’s explanation of how bank credit expansion causes the boom-bust cycle, what is now known as Austrian business cycle theory. However, the reigning view today in both academia and the popular media is the Keynesian explanation, derived from John Maynard Keynes’s famous 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
