Once upon a time there was a northern, medieval phenomenon as much the subject of universal myth and curiosity as that of the enchantress city-republics flourishing down south: the Hanseatic League of the mid-13th to 16th centuries. “The Hansa“ (old German for “associations“) or “The League,“ as it was known, began as a treaty between Lübeck and Hamburg “to clear the road of pirates and robbers between the Elbe and the Trave“ [a river in northern Germany with its delta at the Baltic sea].

Yugoslavia was a communist country from the end of World War II until its bloody breakup in 1991. In the years directly following the war, it was as brutal as any communist regime — it repossessed property and jailed or killed whoever uttered a word against Marxist ideology. However, in the decades after the 1940s — especially in the 70s — it was the most liberal communist country in the world. In sharp contrast to the Soviet Union, this Balkan state enjoyed a dose of economic freedom that the average Russian could only dream of.

In 2015, the federal government (namely, the FCC) implemented new monopolistic regulations which it called “net neutrality.” In 2017, the FCC then repealed some of these regulations. In the weeks and months preceding the repeal, various billionaires and other leftists hysterically predicted that the end of net neutrality would usher in a dystopia in which only the super rich could access the internet. 

The recent elections in the Eurozone have shown that the risks to the European project remain. In Germany, an insufficient victory from Merkel, the collapse of the social democrats and the rise of the alternative right and extreme left have surprised many.

Based on how frequently the subject came up with friends and families during the holidays, I have a feeling that the topic of cryptocurrencies will not be going away in 2018. 

One question I see frequently raised in online Austrian circles is how Bitcoin and other crypto fit with Mises’s regression thereom, and so I wanted to share a great blog post by Bob Murphy in 2014 on this topic to help clarify the subject for any interested readers:

Nowadays, rarely a week goes by free from news about the so-called gender pay gap. There is even now a “wage-gap day“ on November 10.  This is the day when women allegedly start to work for free for the rest of the year. The remaining 51 days are 14% of the year — a figure corresponding to the wage gap between women and men.

For most economic commentators the underlying driving force of inflation is inflationary expectations1 . For instance, if there is a sharp increase in the price of oil, individuals may form higher inflationary expectations that could set in motion spiraling price inflation. Or so it is held.

Open, competitive markets have a resilient capacity to successfully coordinate the actions of, now, billions of people around the world. With an amazing adaptability to changing circumstances, the actions and reactions of multitudes of suppliers and demanders are brought into balance with each other. Yet, none of this requires government planning, regulation or directing control. But how does this all come about?