This issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics features articles that make important contributions to monetary theory and policy. Jeffrey Herbener and David Rapp draw out the implications of Mises’s theory of monetary calculation for the purchase or sale of business assets, particularly entire business firms.
We are one week away from the EU referendum, the moment when the British people will be called upon to make a historic decision – will they vote to “Brexit” or to “Bremain”? Both camps have been going at each other with fierce campaigns to tilt the vote in their direction, but according to the latest polls, with the “Leave” camp’s latest surge still within the margin of error, the projected outcome is too close to call.
A defining characteristic of socialism in all its forms in all places and at all times is a relatively small political elite (and its “private sector” cronies) that lives lavishly by plundering its population, destroying its economy, imposing a regime of equality of poverty and misery; and turning almost everyone into a dependent on the state for survival. Joseph Stalin was the wealthiest man in the world during his time, not the Rockefellers, Morgans, or anyone else, as the de facto “owner” of the entire Soviet Union.
There is no American politician more closely associated with “progressive” economic causes than Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. The senator is widely regarded by the political Left as an expert on financial issues, is a self-professed champion of the “working poor,” and is a proud, finger-wagging chastiser of the 1 percent and Wall Street. Her cause is to lift up the least powerful and protect them from the most powerful. She appears to genuinely believe in this cause, and has made several policy proposals that she believes will serve it.
More than thirty years ago—in 1928, to be precise— H. G. Wells published a minor propagandistic novel called “The Open Conspiracy.” Though I reviewed it at the time, I’ve forgotten now exactly what that open conspiracy was. But the description seems to fit with peculiar aptness something that is happening in the United States today.
Today the Bank of England announced that it would follow the lead of the Federal Reserve and maintain interest rates at .5%. The bank didn’t stop there however, warning voters that next week’s Brexit referendum posed “the largest immediate risk facing UK financial markets, and possibly also global financial markets.
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 124–128
What is the relationship between opportunity cost, choice and action? In my review of Eduard Braun’s Finance behind the Veil of Money (2014), I took exception with his view that opportunity costs are not only unnecessary, but even detrimental to understanding decision making.
