Chris Johns at the Irish Times is dismayed by all the support he sees for Brexit. He’s vexed by the fact so many of Brexit’s boosters are — in Johns’s eyes—going against their own economic interests.
The economics profession has recently neglected the connections between the purchasing power and the quality of money. In order to cover this gap, I will analyze the quality of money and how its changes affect the purchasing power of money. I will argue that changes in the quality of money can be far more important for the value of money than changes in its quantity. This conclusion is in line with the subjectivist approach of the Austrian school. In fact, the quantity of money is an objective and measurable aggregate.
The public still doesn’t know who won the Iowa caucuses. Maybe the leaders of the Democratic Party don’t know either.
But there’s an important lesson here: if one’s political process is founded on votes counted through a phone app, or a “direct recording electronic” (DRE) voting machine, centralized technical control of the system raises the risk of system-wide failure and corruption.
In a bit of holiday news no one will care about, the Treasury announced it would return to selling twenty-year treasury bonds to aid in funding the nation’s trillion-dollar deficit. It was 1986 when the Treasury last issued twenty-year paper. Of course the question is: who or what will be the buyers?
Today’s brand of the left-leaning politician is all about substituting what sounds good for what actually works. Modern politics, whether in the US or Europe, is about taking a chainsaw to everything that produced even a modicum of success to appease the deities espousing progressive orthodoxy.
A common issue with economists and political economists from left to right is that they misunderstand the market economy as simply being a set of production processes. We see this in Lenin’s statement that the Soviet Union should be run like one big factory. We see it in market socialists from Frederic Taylor to Oskar Lange attempting to respond to (and resolve) Mises’s argument that socialist economic calculation is impossible. And we see the same thing in the efficiency (and market failure) nonsense of Chicago school economists.
Despite the media’s fearmongering, the Virginia Citizens Defense League Lobby Day 2020, which took place on January 20, turned out to be a normal event.
Proponents of intellectual property rights often rely on one of two lines of reasoning. The first is based on the misunderstanding that the frequency or volume of innovations determine economic growth. The second is captured by the question, “So if I spend $1 billion on R&D (research and development) to bring a new drug to market, anyone should be able to copy my drug without compensation?” Both are based on the same fundamental error: assuming that innovation is a matter of production. It is not.
Why do individuals value bread less than gold, when bread is obviously more “useful” than gold? To provide an answer to this question economists refer to the law of diminishing marginal utility.
From the time I was an undergraduate, I can remember reading many articles by Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). I found his insights valuable enough that I eventually wrote a book, The Apostle of Peace, about what I considered were his best sustained arguments. Many of his shorter arguments were not included. But every so often, I go back and read one or two of his books in search of overlooked inspiration.
