The New York Times managed to find some young people whose silver spoons provide a sour taste in their mouths. To hear them talk, their good fortune is making them sick. 

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[A selection from What Has Government Done to Our Money?]

Now we may ask: what is the supply of money in society and how is that supply used? In particular, we may raise the perennial question, how much money “do we need”? Must the money supply be regulated by some sort of “criterion,” or can it be left alone to the free market?

Thanks to lockdowns, high unemployment, and general uncertainty and fear over covid-19, the personal saving rate in the United States in October was 13.6 percent, the highest since the mid-1970s. This is down from April’s rate of 33.7 percent, which was the highest saving rate recorded since the Second World War.

The Essential Austrian Economics
by Christopher J. Coyne and Peter J. Boettke
Fraser Institute, 2020
68 pages

Christopher Coyne and Peter Boettke, both professors of economics at George Mason University, say

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Near the beginning of Human Action, Mises makes a remarkable statement: “it is in this subjectivism that the objectivity of our science [economics] lies” (p. 21). What does he mean by this? How can a science be objective by being subjective.

Twenty-five years ago, on December 15, 1995, the fifteen heads of state and government of the then EU decided at a council meeting in Madrid to name the future common currency the ”euro” and to introduce it from January 1, 1999, initially as a book currency at a fixed exchange rate. The actual introduction of cash took place in 2002. Denmark, Great Britain, and Sweden, however, retained their national currencies—and still do today.