[This passage is excerpted from Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791.] 

If there is one thing every honest money-saving advisor would agree on, it’s that a payday loan is a bad idea. Taking a high interest loan backed by nothing but your word to pay off your current account to fuel consumption with no capital investment is just leading you on the road to ruin.

[The State] forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or alien.
—Albert Jay Nock, 1928, On Doing the Right Thing

The path to the Federal Reserve’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), or Fedcoin, continues to be played out before the public. This time, Fed vice chair for supervision Randal K. Quarles gave a speech Monday sharing his general ideas. His conclusions are interesting:

First, the U.S. dollar payment system is very good, and it is getting better. Second, the potential benefits of a Federal Reserve CBDC are unclear. Third, developing a CBDC could, I believe, pose considerable risks.

Under the Biden administration the US continued escalating the economic and geopolitical frictions with China. At the recent G7 Summit in Carbis Bay, President Biden sought to rally a “united front” against China with traditional G7 allies and new ones such as Australia, India, South Korea, and South Africa and rebuked China on economic policies, human rights, and tensions in the East and South China Seas.

According to a popular way of thinking, the central bank can influence the rate of economic expansion by means of monetary policy. It is also held that this influence carries a price, which manifests itself in terms of inflation. For instance, if the goal is to reach faster economic growth and a lower unemployment rate then citizens should be ready to pay a price for this in terms of a higher inflation rate. Note that inflation is defined by a popular way of thinking as increases in the prices of goods and services.

In his book Denationalisation of Money, F.A. Hayek argued that governments have never devoted their power to providing proper money over time.

This second part of the series about the Principles of Economics treats Menger’s exposition of the economy. In continuation of the first part, which covered the general concept of goods, the part on the economy treats the role of economic goods in relation to human wants.

With the publication of his Principles of Economics in 1871, Carl Menger (1840–1921) laid the groundwork for the Austrian school. His contribution is famous beyond Austrian economics, because it was one of the fundamental works of the subjective value theory and of marginal analysis. Yet the content of Menger’s book goes much further. It has lost none of its appeal, as it is still one of the best books to learn how the market economy works.