In testimony before the US House of Representatives on Tuesday, Chair Powell noted economic challenges under covid, as well as supposed triumphs such as an increase in household spending “likely owing in part to federal stimulus payments and expanded unemployment benefits.”
That would be laudable if it weren’t free market interventionism:
Chairman Powell at the August 27 Jackson Hole symposium emphasized what he sees as the malleability of economic theory, noting that the apparent tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, known as the Phillips curve, hasn’t been working as once hypothesized. He alluded to an era when the curve allegedly worked better than it does now:
Ancient Rome, Greece, Babylon, Egypt, India, China, and Africa too, all had slavery. None of them created the Industrial Revolution. Great Britain and the United States did create the Industrial Revolution, on a foundation of economic freedom and respect for individual rights.
Last week, I talked about Mises and moral relativism, and in doing so I suggested a fundamental rule for understanding Mises. He always tries to defend the free market and his style of praxeological economics from any attack by other types of thought. Although he was a scholar of great learning and says interesting and valuable things about many different subjects, he is not trying to defend a particular philosophical system. This week, I’ll extend the discussion to one aspect of religion and theology. Once more, the same principle applies.
Today marks the birthday of Ludwig von Mises, and day #2 of our Annual Fall Campaign.
Mises was the most important scholar of the twentieth century. He revolutionized our understanding of economic science as a powerful champion of liberty and property and remains one of the greatest enemies of socialism.
As we near November, Americans hear political partisans arguing more and more intensely that if we would just vote for them and their coconspirators that would put us in the best of all possible worlds. It reminds me of Will Rogers’s quip that “if we got one-tenth of what was promised to us…there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven.”
The mission of the Mises Institute is simple. We want to spread the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and the scholars he inspired. Ideas that are vital for a free and prosperous civilization.
We do this through our student programs, our popular articles, one of the largest free economics libraries available online, and our new animated videos for beginners. Online and in person, we attack the state, the political class, and their crony clients—without exception and without apology.
The riots in Louisville are only the latest in a long string of violent, raging mob riots by the criminal Marxist BLM movement, their mostly white “antifa” thuggish allies, and assorted looters. In this case, “Two police officers have been shot in Louisville, Ky., amid riots following the announcement of an indictment in the shooting of Breonna Taylor. Louisville chief of police Robert Schroeder confirmed that the officers were shot and were taken to a local hospital.
Following the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, many commentators associate economic growth with increases in the demand for goods and services.
Both Keynes and Friedman held that the Great Depression of the 1930s was due to an insufficiency of aggregate demand and that thus the way to fix the problem was to boost aggregate demand.
For Keynes, this could be achieved by having the federal government borrow more money and spend it when the private sector would not. Friedman advocated that the Federal Reserve pump more money to revive demand.
[Editor’s note: This is a special preview—for Mises Wire readers—of Europe’s Century of Crises under Dollar Hegemony: A Dialogue on the Global Tyranny of Unsound Money, a dialogue book by Brendan Brown and Philippe Simonnot to be published October 8 by Palgrave Macmillan.]
