By some theories such as the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), money originated on account of the government decree. Money according to the MMT is what the State decides it is going to be.

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A gentleman who does work for us sent me a text recently saying the price of his supplies has increased 20 percent, so he wants to increase his monthly fee 10 percent. It was a nice way to ask, and I said sure, especially given that he’s willing to take a haircut on his labor to make the increase more palatable.

Chairman Jerome Powell would be happy to hear this story, as the Federal Reserve prints mightily to push the CPI (Consumer Price Index) to 2 percent and beyond. Though perhaps Chairman Powell would prefer my tradesman to pass a full 20 percent price increase to me.

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Priti Patel (the UK secretary of state, akin to the US’s attorney general but with a much wider purview) has been recently considering new laws to tackle a spate of dog thefts across the country. The crime wave has been spurred by lockdown measures, with many people desiring “covid pets.”

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.

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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.