The United States’s jobs recovery is extremely poor, especially if we consider the size of the monetary and fiscal stimulus and the spectacular upgrade to GDP estimates. After a massive consensus increase in GDP recovery estimates to 6.5 percent in 2021, no one should be cheering a 5.9 percent unemployment rate, 58 percent employment-to-population ratio, and, even worse, a 61.6 percent labor force participation rate that has remained stagnant for ten months.

My thanks to Carlo Lottieri for publishing an Italian translation of ”A Brief History of Secession Referenda in Europe“ in the publicationL’indro: “Breve storia dei referendum sulla secessione“:

Here’s something we often heard in 2020 from experts who wanted long and draconian covid lockdowns: “Yes, these stay-at-home orders are causing economic turmoil, but if you don’t lock everyone down now—and keep them locked down for a long time—your economy will be even worse off!”

Britain’s economy had been suffering chronic unemployment for a decade prior to 1936. Economic theory as it was then understood clearly showed that the cause of a market surplus was sellers asking a price in excess of what buyers are willing to pay.

Browsing through history, we can identify several examples of states overcoming the hurdles of geography to achieve great feats. Though the plague of an inhospitable geography is not an insurmountable obstacle to development, it remains crucial to understanding disparities in income across countries. However, some mainstream economists place a premium on institutional development as a panacea for economic growth. Institutions are indeed important, but the legacy of geography still lingers.

What is noteworthy about the depressing title to this article is its source.

Austrian school economists have long demonstrated that monopolies only tend to form as a result of government intervention, and “natural monopolies” have virtually never actually existed. Nonetheless, we are continually told by political and academic “experts” that unregulated economies inevitably give rise to monopolies, business trusts, and cartels, all of which they assure us have disastrous consequences for ordinary people.

In the past few weeks, I have been discussing a number of points in Human Action, and today I propose to concentrate on a fundamental insight that is a main theme of the book. There are, Mises says, only two ways to organize production in a complex modern economy that produces a great many goods and services. One is by centralized decision-making and the other is through the free market.