Puerto Rico owes $70 billion to various creditors, including American hedge funds and other funds. Puerto Rican debt has been downgraded to junk status. Whether or not Puerto Rico is America’s Greece is rather debatable because the amounts are so much lower for Puerto Rico. Greece owes over 220 billion euros in bailout funds alone. Combined with other debts, the amounts are simply much larger in Greece.
To the surprise of many, Bolivia is now Latin America’s fastest growing economy. At a 5 percent growth rate it now outstrips once dominant but now stagnating regional competitors like Brazil and Peru. Furthermore Bolivia boasts some very impressive macrofundametals: its level of international reserves are the highest in all of Latin America, it has slashed its government debt, and its inflation rate stands at a respectable 5 percent. This accompanies a 307 percent increase in average income and a 25 percent reduction in the poverty rate since 2001.
Today is Lew Rockwell’s birthday, and this is a fitting time to reflect on his significance for Austrian economics and for libertarianism. Lew has been the foremost advocate and promoter of the work of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. He founded the Mises Institute in 1982 in order to bring to the attention of a wide scholarly and popular audience Mises and Rothbard’s distinctive and far-reaching vision. He did so at a time when the vast forces of the Kochtopus were arrayed against Rothbard.
Preface by David Gordon
When Murray Rothbard wrote “Science, Technology, and Government” in 1959, supporters of the free market needed to confront a challenge that remains relevant today. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched its “Sputnik” satellite, thereby defeating the United States in the race between the two countries to be first into space. Did this victory show, or at least suggest, the superiority of Soviet centrally-planned science to the American market economy?
The position that a tax exemption is a subsidy has always been wrong. In no way is a person being subsidized when the state simply refrains from seizing a portion of that person’s private property. The idea that it is a subsidy relies on the assumption that all wealth is the government’s wealth first, and that any wealth held in private hands is somehow being withheld from the proper owners (i.e., the government).
There are three groups of people who believe that the Supreme Court does not make decisions based on personal whims, personal ideology, pressure from interest groups, and and eye toward building the court’s power. These three groups are: 1) small children in civics classes. 2) people in power who benefit from the perpetuation of the myth of the non-political court, and 3) the very naive.
Government now routinely embraces massive amounts of mud- and blame-slinging as standard operating procedure. The “other guys” are always extremists who exhibit unprincipled intransigence, which prevents agreement on self-defined white hats’ solutions. It illustrates that the government we suffer from is not a means to expanding harmony, but the greatest cause of our disharmony.
Global markets appear to be unsure that the Greek debt crisis will be resolved in an orderly way. The Fed meanwhile is taking a more blasé approach. Paul-Martin Foss writes:
You’d think with all the “stimulus” from Washington over the fifteen years since the dotcom bust, American capitalism would be booming. It’s not. On the measures which count when it comes to sustainable growth and real wealth creation, the trends are slipping backwards — not leaping higher.
Those of us leaning in the Austrian direction see bubbles and malinvestments around every corner and assume, wrongly as it turns out, the market will right these wrongs lickety-split. But, for the moment a rational market is no match for cheap money. “Any college that is thinking about capital expansion, now is a very good time,” Robert Murray, an economist at Dodge Data told the Wall Street Journal. “Several years down the road, the climate might not be as good.”
