Those of us who get drawn, often against our better judgment, into Internet debates soon discover that the case against the market economy in the popular mind boils down to a few major claims. Here I intend to dissect one of them: under the unhampered market we’d be at the mercy of vicious monopolists.
Measured in dollars, the current bull market for gold started in December 2015, since which its price in dollars has almost doubled. Other than the odd headline when gold exceeded its previous September 2011 high of $1,920, only gold bugs seem to be excited. But in our modern macroeconomic world of government-issued currencies, which has moved on from the days when gold operated as a monetary standard, it is viewed as an anachronism—a pet rock, as Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal called it in 2015, only a few months before this bull market commenced.
Negative interest rates have long since become a reality. But we are not talking about negative real interest rates. This is the case when the return on an investment is lower than the officially stated inflation rate. In today’s context, negative interest rates are rather negative nominal interest rates; that is, the nominal interest rate is below 0 percent.
Among the many insights Mises provides in his magnum opus, Human Action, there are crystal-clear considerations about the price mechanism, the role entrepreneurs play in fostering efficient resource allocation, and how socialism is detrimental to the economy, insofar as it disrupts the smooth interplay of prices, entrepreneurship, and resources’ allocation.
