The 2020 election has revealed jaw-dropping levels of “liberal” or progressive bias in the media, from the increasing ascendance of woke language, enforced by the thought police, to deliberately ignored issues and information considered uncongenial to those dominating the agenda. To many, it seems as if the power being exercised against freedom of uncoerced and uncensored expression had metastasized full-blown out of almost nowhere.

According to the popular way of thinking, various economic data can provide an analyst with the necessary information regarding the state of the economy. It is held that by inspecting various economic indicators such as the gross domestic product or industrial production, an analyst could ascertain the state of the economic business cycle.

According to the Financial Times from October 18, 2020, senior Federal Reserve officials are calling for tougher financial regulation to prevent the US central bank’s low interest rate policies from giving rise to excessive risk taking and asset bubbles in the markets.

Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, told the Financial Times that the Fed lacked sufficient tools to “stop firms and households” from taking on “excessive leverage” and called for a “rethink” on “financial stability” issues in the US.

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One century ago, Mises began the socialist calculation debate, publishing his essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920) and his subsequent treatise Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922).

[A selection from Nation, State, and Economy. Editor’s note: When Mises refers to “liberals” or “liberalism” he means the ideology of laissez-faire, sometimes now called “classical liberalism.”]

In chapter 11 of Man, Economy, and State [1962] (2009), Rothbard sets out his theory of money and its influences on business fluctuations. Among the many insights Rothbard provides, we find a compelling and cogent refutation of Irving Fisher’s equation of exchange (in section 13)—which underlies the monetarist quantity theory of money.