The yearly growth rate of US AMS jumped to 26.5 percent in April—a record high figure since 1960 (see chart). Now, during the period from January 1960 to April 2020 the average time lag between changes in the money supply and changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) stood at twenty-nine months.
The philosopher Robert Nozick raises some important criticisms of Austrian economics in his “On Austrian Methodology.” This paper came out in 1970 and it is conveniently available in Nozick’s Socratic Puzzles (Harvard, 1998). I’m going to talk about a couple of the criticisms here. You might think that I don’t have to do this. The libertarian economist and theorist Walter Block wrote a long and impressive paper, “On Robert Nozick’s ‘On Austrian Methodology,’” that responded to each of the many arguments in Nozick’s paper.
Does a pandemic trump entrepreneurial foresight? Many in business will say yes, “nobody saw this coming.” Lack of customer demand and government lockdowns are “no fault of their own.”
Thanks to the great John Tamny for shining a positive light on our current circumstances in “Where Are All the Austrian Scholars’ Yachts?” (RealClearMarkets, April 30). We do share a long-term optimistic view of capitalism, and Ludwig von Mises himself said that access to stock markets and financial markets was a defining characteristic of capitalism! However, central banks and their fiat money, like the Fed and the US dollar, are definitely not part of capitalism.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, says an old adage. Unfortunately, the saying has come to haunt India’s fight against the COVID virus. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) stringently regulates which private labs can and cannot test for the virus. The ICMR licensing rules are intended to help consumers by protecting them against fraudulent labs. These regulations have however had quite the opposite effect.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said ”he was ready to ‘throw the book’ at those who hiked prices on essential goods by five or ten times their usual value.”
In economics, numbers without context are often difficult to understand. The price of apples can only be understood when compared to the price of oranges, or to your salary, or to yesterday’s price. This is especially true with astronomically high numbers, such as $23 trillion.
