In his latest response, Professor Hülsmann does not engage with several of the central points of my argument. Instead, he focuses on two issues: my use of the term “hyperinflation” and the counterfactual question of what would have happened in Argentina if Javier Milei had closed the central bank on his first day in office.
Is building more homes not enough? Recently, there have been more and more Gen-Z memes about boomers selling their overvalued houses to BlackRock instead of to young couples, and then the corporation rents the house to the couple for 2x the price. The housing crisis is not a false alarm. The median rent price went up 25 percent in just 6 years. This is a serious economic problem for America.
The sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel prompts the question, what has happened to steel-making in the United States? The answer, in a sense, is obvious: the main source of iron ore in the United States has thinned out. From the mid 19th to the late 20th century, the United States dominated steel-making.
Most people agree that fairness is an important normative ideal. It is not always clear what is meant by fairness, but many would argue that fairness demands equal treatment, at least when it comes to deriving the rules and laws by which society is governed. Although some anarchists believe there is no need for rules governing society, other than the defense of private property rights, many people support the classical liberal ideal of equality under the law. It may therefore be helpful to clarify what is meant by equality in this context.
It is widely held that what causes recessions is a decline in the demand for goods and services. If the private sector fails to strengthen its demand, then the government should step in by raising its demand for goods and services. However, any individual’s ability to demand is constrained by their ability to produce goods valued by others. The more valued goods individuals produce, the more goods they can demand. According to James Mill,
Every major economic illusion begins with the corruption of a word. Inflation once meant popularly what it still means in truth—the artificial expansion of money and credit. But, over time, it has been redefined to describe its consequence rather than its cause. This deliberate inversion of language serves a political purpose: it shifts blame from those who create money to those who merely spend it, transforming an act of monetary fraud into a mere statistical “phenomenon.” The result is profound.
