Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Economists promote free market capitalism as the most advantageous system for human development. Notwithstanding the popularity of their rhetoric, capitalism remains a derisive term in the developing world. Transplanting promarket institutions to developing countries has failed to generate widespread support for capitalism. For capitalism to work in the developing world it must be aided by the right cultural infrastructure.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

In light of the government’s response to the January 6 storming of the Capitol, anyone with a sense of political sanity can no longer argue that the war on terror is separate from American domestic affairs.

One argument against the idea of technological unemployment, offered by many people who today sincerely style themselves as leading defenders of the free market, goes that automation will create more jobs than it destroys but due to the nature of the market, the nature of those jobs is, if not fundamentally unknowable, functionally indescribable for the purposes of the argument over automation. How could a person a hundred years ago, the reasoning goes, predict the existence of jobs like “app developer,” “nuclear engineer,” or “diversity and inclusion consultant”?

Popes normally stick to their bailiwick, faith and worship. But Pope Francis’s criticisms of capitalism came early and often, escalating since the beginning of the covid pandemic. The pontiff describes free market thinking as “magic theories.” 

One popular critique of bitcoin is energy cost per transaction. This doesn’t begin to capture bitcoin’s massive energy savings compared to fiat currency.

Bitcoin’s cost per transaction is well known, and often critiqued; one article in Wired magazine called bitcoin “[a] big middle finger to earth’s climate.” This is because bitcoin’s security, redundancy, and architecture are more energy intensive than traditional payments relying on a single point of failure.

“You are hitting the nail with too many hammers.” I can still remember Bob Clower, my dissertation chairman at the time, saying that to me after reading my most recent work. It was directed at the fact that I had shown problems with a particular competing argument “six ways from Sunday.” That is, It was overkill.

Of course, he didn’t note that his habit of saying, “This is related to that interesting literature. You should go figure it out and tie it in with your work,” just about every time I came by, may have been a contributing factor.

The Washington Post reports that a group of thirty-three current and former students at Christian colleges are suing the Department of Education in a class action lawsuit in an attempt to abolish any religious exemptions for schools that do not abide by the current sexual and gender zeitgeist sweeping the land.

High inflation takes off where political forces are too strong to permit the implementation of harsh remedial measures with respect to taxation and monetary policy such as to prevent an implosion of the national currency. In the contemporary global financial marketplace, there has been fluctuating concern about the US heading toward this point, albeit at a highly uncertain date, as evidenced by waves of attack last spring, summer, and autumn on the US dollar. In reality, though, the long-run inflation threat level is higher in Europe than the US.