Jesús Huerta de Soto is the author of Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, and numerous other works exploring foundational issues in Austrian economics and political economy. A Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, Dr. Huerta de Soto is expanding his efforts to make his lectures and other works more readily available online and to an English-speaking audience.
[This essay originally appeared as “The Theory of Economic Development and the European Miracle” in The Collapse of Development Planning, edited by Peter J. Boettke.]
Amid all the hysteria surrounding Donald Trump, clear and sober analyses of who he is and what to expect have been few and far between.
I’ve already seen numerous progressives warning that Trump intends to eviscerate entitlements. It’s as if facts never enter the progressive consciousness. Their opponents are an undifferentiated blob and hold what progressives take to be generically right-wing positions.
A fall in the US unemployment rate to 4.6% in November from 4.9% in the month before, and 5% in November last year, has prompted some commentators to suggest that we are almost at the so-called natural rate, which is believed to be at around 4.5%.
It is held that once the unemployment rate falls below an “optimal” rate — called the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) — it sets off an inflationary spiral.
[It is with great sadness that we have learned of the passing of Dr. Ralph Raico. In remembrance, here is the story of how Mises met the man who would go on to be one of the great champions of his ideas, as told by Guido Hulsmann in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.]
Murray Rothbard was the first in a long line of whiz kids who found a new intellectual home in Human Action and in Mises’s seminars.
Auburn, Alabama, is featured on the front cover of today’s Wall Street Journal. I was interviewed extensively for the story, but was not mentioned. The story is about the relationship between state universities and increased manufacturing jobs. It turns out that my input did not fit into the story.
I am sorry to have to report that Ralph Raico has passed away. His intellectual brilliance was evident from an early age, and while still in high school, he attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at New York University. There he met Murray Rothbard, who became his lifelong friend. Ralph was one of the most brilliant members of Rothbard’s Circle Bastiat. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago, working under Friedrich Hayek.
