Ryan McMaken (RM): There is a lot of talk these days about the US losing its global monetary hegemony. But a lot needs to happen in terms of unwinding the present system before that can happen. At the heart of this seems to be what you call “globalized money without a global money.” What do you mean by that, and what does it have to do with the dollar’s global importance?
In times of banking and financial crises, central banks always intervene. This is not a law of nature, but it is an empirical law of central bank behavior. The Federal Reserve was created 110 years ago specifically to address banking panics by expanding money and credit when needed, by providing what was called in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 an “elastic currency,” so it could make loans in otherwise illiquid markets, when private institutions can’t or won’t.
In his recent address, President Joe Biden claimed that “wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil.” This is flat-out wrong. There are many arguments that can be made for Biden’s claim. However, not only can they all be refuted, but they have all already been refuted.
When I was an economics undergraduate back in the 1990s, central bankers at the Federal Reserve were more or less above criticism. Those were the days when Alan Greenspan was acclaimed as “the maestro” and it was simply assumed central bankers could skillfully plan the economy to ensure growing prosperity forever. This isn’t an exaggeration. In 1998, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by MIT economist Rudi Dornbusch claiming that “we have. .
Economist Jeremy Horpedahl dismissed the silly claim by anticapitalists that capitalism must engineer food scarcity for the sake of profits. He presented a graph of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data demonstrating a substantial decrease in household food expenditure as a percentage of income—from 44 percent in 1901 to a mere 9 percent in 2021. This is something to celebrate and certainly can be attributed to the abundance of market economies.
The United States government, which prides itself in being the leading force in defending freedom throughout the world, has a history of putting a muzzle on news organizations and individuals throughout its history. From the early colonial period to the beginnings of the internet, the state has consistently silenced its critics, which seems to be its true nature.
People are constantly told to follow their dreams, but doing so is futile without execution. Dreaming is a blueprint for future success; however, some people live in the dream instead of working to make it a reality. Ambition is insufficient to reap success, and many fail to realize their potential. Success is only actualized when you stop dreaming and start doing.
Stories cannot substitute for historical facts even when people want these stories to be true. With the influence of Black Lives Matter, resurrecting the atrocities of Western colonialism has become fashionable. The death of George Floyd revived a torrent of anticolonialism sentiment in Western societies fueled by resounding demands for governments to atone for the sins of colonialism.
The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
—Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Pretense of Knowledge”
