[This article is adapted from A Guide to Good Money: Beyond the Illusions of Asset Inflation by Brendan Brown and Robert Pringle (2022, Palgrave Macmillan).]
Bad money regimes base themselves on a dysfunctional social contract.
Is praxeology inconsistent? Praxeologists criticize neoclassical economists for using false assumptions in their models. For example, neoclassicals acknowledge that the conditions for “perfect competition” are never found in the actual world. Firms selling a good such as wheat may not have much control over price, but they aren’t perfect “price takers,” as perfect competition requires. Nevertheless, the model is useful, neoclassicals aver, for generating predictions about the real-world behavior of certain firms.
Pascal Salin is an economist, professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Dauphine, and was president of the Mont-Pelerin Society from 1994 to 1996.
When a person is free to work, shop, and invest, he brings to each task his knowledge from doing the other tasks. As he works, he has a sense of what it takes to please customers, because he’s also a customer. As he shops, he has a sense of what workers can do for him, because he’s also a worker. As he invests, he has a sense of who adds value best, because he also works to add value and shops for value.
It is commonly held that prices of goods and services can be produced by means of supply and demand curves. These curves describe the relationship between the prices and the quantity of goods supplied and demanded.
Within the framework of supply-demand curves, an increase in the price of a good is associated with a fall in the quantity demanded and an increase in the quantity supplied. Conversely, a decline in the price of a good is associated with an increase in the quantity demanded and in a decline in the quantity supplied.
Radley Balko, a defender of liberty best known for his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, has been fired by the Washington Post. Balko writes: “So after nine years, I’m being let go by the Washington Post. This is disappointing but not surprising. In recent years, the Opinion leadership has made it increasingly difficult to do the reporting & in-depth analysis I was hired to do -- in favor of short, hot takes.”
The subject of time and money has hit a boiling point. Just look at Sri Lanka and Iran, where food riots have turned deadly, or, shall we say, currency riots have.
“Can we film the operation/Is the head dead yet/Get the widow on the set/We need dirty laundry,” sang Don Henley in 1982. Crime stories grab people’s attention more than almost anything else. What do the stats say for San Antonio?
As Mr. Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” continues, “kick ‘em when they’re up/kick ‘em when they’re down”: they’re all over the place in the last dozen years. A couple of isolated spots do pop out.
In March 2019, the pseudonymous “PlanB,” who describes himself as a “former institutional investor with 25 years of experience in financial markets,” published a short article describing what he dubs the “stock-to-flow” (S2F) model of bitcoin pricing.
