With your support, the Mises Institute can send Mises U students home with a stack of Austrian classics such as America’s Great Depression, Where Keynes Went Wrong, and Economics in One Lesson. After their week of destroying every preconceived, state-curriculum notion of how the world works, Mises U grads will have another month before returning to their college classes.
[This passage is excerpted from Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791.]
If there is one thing every honest money-saving advisor would agree on, it’s that a payday loan is a bad idea. Taking a high interest loan backed by nothing but your word to pay off your current account to fuel consumption with no capital investment is just leading you on the road to ruin.
[The State] forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or alien.
—Albert Jay Nock, 1928, On Doing the Right Thing
The path to the Federal Reserve’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), or Fedcoin, continues to be played out before the public. This time, Fed vice chair for supervision Randal K. Quarles gave a speech Monday sharing his general ideas. His conclusions are interesting:
First, the U.S. dollar payment system is very good, and it is getting better. Second, the potential benefits of a Federal Reserve CBDC are unclear. Third, developing a CBDC could, I believe, pose considerable risks.
Under the Biden administration the US continued escalating the economic and geopolitical frictions with China. At the recent G7 Summit in Carbis Bay, President Biden sought to rally a “united front” against China with traditional G7 allies and new ones such as Australia, India, South Korea, and South Africa and rebuked China on economic policies, human rights, and tensions in the East and South China Seas.
According to a popular way of thinking, the central bank can influence the rate of economic expansion by means of monetary policy. It is also held that this influence carries a price, which manifests itself in terms of inflation. For instance, if the goal is to reach faster economic growth and a lower unemployment rate then citizens should be ready to pay a price for this in terms of a higher inflation rate. Note that inflation is defined by a popular way of thinking as increases in the prices of goods and services.
In his book Denationalisation of Money, F.A. Hayek argued that governments have never devoted their power to providing proper money over time.
This second part of the series about the Principles of Economics treats Menger’s exposition of the economy. In continuation of the first part, which covered the general concept of goods, the part on the economy treats the role of economic goods in relation to human wants.
