[Excerpt from chapter 3 of the Bastiat Collection.]

I wish someone would offer a prize—not of a hundred francs, but of a million, with crowns, medals and ribbons—for a good, simple and intelligible definition of the word “Government.”1

While Americans contemplated Jeffrey Epstein’s demise, Chinese authorities had more pressing matters as the country’s third bank was bailed out late last week. HengFeng Bank with $200 billion in assets fell into the hands of “Central Huijin Investment, a subsidiary of the China Investment Corporation that acts as the Chinese government’s shareholder in the country’s four biggest banks,” according to a brief report overnight by Shanghai Securities News, published by state news agency Xinhua and cited by Zero Hedge.

One’s own bookcase provides the perfect illustration of time preference, which is the greater value of possession over non possession. There will be books bought on a whim which just clutter a bookshelf and have no value. Next time there’s a clear-out, they are destined for the charity shop: there’s no difference in time value, being worthless to the owner today and in the future.

The ongoing “World War of Currencies”, as the German journalist Daniel D. Eckert called it, the battle for the future of the world monetary system is not a shallow action film but more like Game of Thrones – a complex series with hundreds of actors and locations, stretching over decades and demanding full concentration from the viewer.

[Excerpt from “The Fall and Rise of Puritanical Policy in America,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 1 (1996): 143–60]

Given the nature of the modern global economic system, it is only natural to focus on the role of government-created money and central banks when discussing recessions and the ever-expanding credit structure. However, it is important to remember that theoretically, booms and busts and other downturns are not impossible in a truly free market system. Although, the length, scale, and scope of such downturns are greatly expanded under a system of fiat credit expansion.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California who taught courses on energy economics. He originally endorsed the standard view among economists that if some physical scientists are right that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to substantial warming, and if the government must “do something,” then the best policy response is a tax on carbon.

In the classic video game Sim City, players acting as the mayor of a simulated city begin by allocating space by industrial, residential, and commercial zones. There is no option in the game to have overlapping districts, where a department store might sit next to a middle-class home. The very idea would seem absurd to modern minds, which typically accept city zoning as an intuitive and unquestionable element of city governance. But prior to the twentieth century, zoning did not exist in the United States.

We are repeatedly told that the unprecedented monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve and other central banks is necessary to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and generate economic growth. The truth is that this scheme is designed to stealthily steal from the productive classes in order to enrich the unproductive financial class and the counterproductive political classes. It is a con game.