Introduction

The problem of government deficit spending and the resulting public debt is a challenge to most modern economies. A few states, such as Germany, with a reputation for fiscal austerity, operated with budget surpluses and declining debt, but that was before the coronavirus gave governments everywhere an excuse to massively extend their powers and increase spending. Now it looks like all nations will have to carry the heavy load of paying off enormous government debts contracted in the pursuit of destructive policies.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Democrats are again pushing to increase the federal minimum wage, this time roughly doubling it to $15 per hour. And as with every such push, that has involved invoking “rosy scenario” sales pitches about how low-wage workers will be big winners.

Review of Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019)

The year 1982 was life changing for me. It also was the year that I met Murray Rothbard and toured what then was East Berlin with him and his wife—and a host of others. And thanks to Rothbard and others in the Austrian school of economics, I was able to understand just why the Communists found it necessary to build a wall to keep people from leaving their country.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Bitcoin as a money is just very unremarkable. Yet this digital coin is well on its way to becoming one of financial history’s great epic stories. Its promotors just hit lucky in finding themselves in the midst of a monetary inflation whose virulence intensified during a great pandemic. Double luck: the greatest speculative narrative of the accompanying asset inflation has been about the miracles of digitalization, a fantastic landscape for nurturing excitement about this new money.