No country is safe from the Eye of Sauron that is the modern-day American national security state. Even some of the US’s ostensible allies can’t escape its all-seeing eye. Hungary and Poland, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), have faced significant criticism from the chattering classes of DC and Brussels in recent years.
The financial covid crash of 2020 came and went in a month as the US government threw every monetary and fiscal trick it had at the government-imposed flash panic. We’ll never know which malivestments would have been cleansed. We live on with goods and labor shortages and with higher prices we’re assured by experts are transient. Supply chain issues, we’re told constantly, with no mention of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet having doubled since the 2020 crash.
No economy has been able to ignore a property bubble and even less so offset it and continue to grow, replacing the bust of the real estate sector with other parts of the economy. Heavily regulated economies from Iceland to Spain have failed to contain the negative impact of a real estate sector collapse. It will not be different in China.
China’s real estate problems are three: the massive size of the sector, its excessive leverage, and the amount of developer debt in the hands of average households and retail investors.
Last month I reviewed Samuel Moyn’s Humane (New York, 2021) but discussed only a few topics in it. Owing to the book’s great importance, I’d like in what follows to address another issue as well, and this is something with which many readers will already be familiar. The principal theme of Moyn’s book, it will be recalled, is that efforts to make war humane can detract from, or even impede, the more important task of bringing war to an end, or at least drastically curtailing it.
Ludwig von Mises has some characteristically acute and important comments on the idea of progress in history, and in what follows, I’d like to address some of these. In the way he develops his views, one of the key themes of his notion of ethics plays an important role.
Samuelson Friedman: The Battle over the Free Market
By Nicholas Wapshott
Norton, 2021
367 pages
It’s not often that a member of the Federal Reserve’s inner circle ditches Fedspeak in favor of something more honest. Governor Christopher J. Waller did exactly that, in his speech titled: The Economic Outlook and a Cautionary Tale on “Idiosyncratic” Price Changes and Inflation, where the latest addition to the Fed’s Board talked about manipulation of (price) inflation data.
He raises some concerns:
Yuri Nicholas Maltsev is an Austrian school economist and economic historian from Tatarstan. He earned his BA and MA degrees from Moscow State University and PhD in labor economics at the Institute of Labor Research in Moscow. Before defecting to the United States in 1989, he was a member of a senior Soviet economics team that worked on President Gorbachev’s reforms package of perestroika. He is currently professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
There are two main philosophical and ideological schools of thought that include the problem of internationalism in their principles. The first is liberal internationalism, which developed within the framework of classical liberalism. The second is orthodox Marxism and its various derivatives that entertain the idea of proletarian internationalism. The concept of internationalism has different origins, meanings, and practical implementations in the two schools of thought.
Protectionism is reviving in Washington on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats are cheering proposals to restrict trade to benefit labor unions and save the environment while some Republicans are reviving Smoot-Hawley style salvation schemes. Protectionist advocates routinely seize the moral high ground—at least as it is scored in Washington—by promising that restricting imports will magically produce fair trade.
