Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 22, no. 2 (Summer 2019) full issue.

ABSTRACT: This Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed, was given at the Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute on March 22, 2019.

You don’t need to be a supporter of President Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the President over a phone call made to the President of Ukraine.

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 22, no. 2 (Summer 2019) full issue.

ABSTRACT: This Lou Church Memorial Lecture given at the AERC in March 2019 focuses on the outcomes of the Enlightenment: reason, the individual, equality, property rights, the separation of church and state, science and politics freed from religious dogma; but also the effort to remove important mediating institutions such as the Church. What is required to be reintroduced that the Enlightenment destroyed?

The Lead-Up to the Plaza Accord

To understand the Plaza Accord, one has to look back to August 15, 1971. On this day Richard Nixon closed the gold window. This step de facto ended the Bretton Woods system, which had been created in 1944 in the New Hampshire town of the same name and was formally terminated in 1973. The era of gold-backed currency was well and truly over; the era of flexible exchange rates had begun. Without a gold anchor, the exchange rate of every currency pair was supposed to be driven exclusively by supply and demand.

“At birth human infants regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in his salient book, Theory and History: The Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution. However, Mises contended that this is far from the reality of human action and how flesh-and-blood people operate in the market. While people may be born with particular talents and abilities, it does not mean they can ignore market preferences and what consumer’s value at any particular point in time.

Things are about to get noisy in Burlington, Vermont. No, it’s not a rally for the state’s Brooklyn-born junior senator. After some pomp including a “mini air-show,” the first two of 20 F-35s have begun settling into their new home at Vermont’s Air National Guard base, located at the Burlington Airport.

UNICEF this month released new data on infant and child mortality. As expected, the data shows continued declines in mortality for children, with most of the biggest gains coming in the lowest-income countries and in the developing world.