The Cato Institute yesterday held a cryptocurrency conference whose keynote speaker was Patrick Byrne (see here for his Mises Institute profile), the CEO of Overstock.com. His speech came in the wake of his announcement that he is stepping down as CEO for an indefinite leave of absence due to health reasons. Byrne looked a little disheveled, had a noticeable cough at times, and mentioned that this speech marked the end of his professional career.
Apalachicola is a tiny town with just over 2,000 people, tucked away on the coast of the Florida panhandle. It is also world famous for being home to the best oysters in the entire world.
In the expositions of Ethical Socialism one constantly finds the assertion that it presupposes the moral purification of men. As long as we do not succeed in elevating the masses morally we shall be unable to transfer the socialist order of society from the sphere of ideas to that of reality. The difficulties in the way of Socialism lie exclusively, or predominantly, in men’s moral shortcomings. Some writers doubt whether this obstacle will ever be overcome; others are content to say that the world will not be able to achieve Socialism for the present or in the immediate future.
Most economic concepts never make it out of the academic journals, let alone into the public eye and public opinion. The concept of “moral hazard” is a rare exception: largely due to the financial crisis, this once-technocratic insurance term has become almost a household word.
In my first semester as a major in economics at Humboldt University in Berlin back in 2008, I attended a lecture on Nobel Prize winning economists by one of my professors. Another student in the audience asked him whether there were any economists who would have deserved a Nobel Prize, but never got one. His answer was close to the following: “John Maynard Keynes would have almost certainly received the prize, but he did not live long enough for that to happen.
The leading narrative in the foreign exchange markets is told and re-told to explain how the Japanese yen has surged this year despite an ever wilder monetary experiment pursued by the Abe government. The story seems plausible to many, and thus is deeply challenging for the backers of sound money principles. The financial TV commentators tell us that the yen is now the safest of all the safe havens. How can this be so?
An argument used time and time again against the idea that individuals have the fundamental right to own firearms is that such a right would have no practical limits; that is, if governments may impose no gun controls then individuals would be able to freely own weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
The week before last marked my first time attending the Austrian Economics Research Conference, an annual meeting of economists of the Austrian school hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, AL. While many of the presentations were interesting, one that I found particularly helpful was that by Patrick Barron of the University of Iowa. What was especially useful was how he tied together monetary and fiscal policy.
In the course of his interesting discussion of “The Politics of Political Economists,” Professor Stigler challenges the alleged view of Professor Mises that “economic statistics, or more generally quantitative economics — generates a radical political viewpoint.”1 Stigler asserts tha
