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It’s one thing for mass democracy to produce bad results, in the form of elected politicians or enacted policies. It’s another when the democratic process itself breaks down because nobody trusts the vote or the people who count it. But that’s precisely where we are.
Election Day 2020 finally arrived, and it looks like it’s going to be a long process before the official winner is finally determined. There will be lawsuits over which ballots will be counted. Both sides will be accused of fraud and of other misdeeds. In the real world, there is always a gray area as to which votes are legit, and which are not. Determining the winners in elections is not a simple matter of just counting every vote. Very close votes are effectively tie votes.
It’s been over a hundred years since Mises wrote The Theory of Money and Credit and since the inception of the Federal Reserve. Yet the Fed is still trying to figure out inflation, so much so that the Reserve Bank of Cleveland operates the Center for Inflation Research (CFIR) in order to:
I don’t subscribe to the rather strained arguments some libertarians make about voting. I don’t think casting a vote implies the voter is tacitly endorsing the political system. I don’t think a vote means the voter implicitly agrees to blithely accept the outcome. I don’t even think a voter necessarily likes the candidate for which he or she has voted.
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Lipton Matthews, whose recent contributions to the Mises Wire offer a libertarian perspective on topics such as empire, colonialism, racism, slavery, capitalism, and riots, was interviewed by Mises Institute associated scholar Jo Ann Cavallo.
JAC: You’ve published several articles since your first one in April of this year, including eight in the past two months. How did you come to learn about the Mises Institute and to publish in this venue?
LM: I have been reading Mises for a long time and decided to share my ideas with the Institute.
Abstract: Professor Joseph Salerno (2019) has commented on my recent reconstruction of the income effect from a causal-realist perspective (Israel, 2018b). In this rejoinder, I clarify my position and show that the main points of criticism in Salerno’s response are unfounded. In particular, I show that my argument does not involve a claim of greater “realism of assumptions” and it by no means contradicts the law of demand.
Abstract: Some Austrian economists have argued that the disutility of labor is a necessary auxiliary empirical assumption to complement otherwise a priori economic theory in order for it to apply to the real world. Without this assumption, it is claimed that individuals will supply the full quantity of labor of which they are physically capable. We argue that the disutility of labor assumption is unnecessary to derive this conclusion, which can instead be derived through standard marginal analysis.
