Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism Now Available in Japanese
Thanks to the tireless efforts of translator Tatsuya Iwakura, Mises’s book Socialism is now available in a Japanese translation. It is available here on Amazon.
Review of Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment
The new issue of Economica features Tomasz Mickiewicz’s thoughtful review of my 2012 book with Nicolai Foss, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm. Notes Mickiewicz:
Magna Carta and the Fantasy of Legal Constraints on States
Magna Carta turns 800 years old today. The Great Charter is often hailed as the first event in a series of limitations on the power of government. For Americans, Marga Carta seems even more important because it is a document that was written and signed for the purpose of limiting the power of a monarch. Americans love grandiose gestures in the form of written documents such as Magna Carta and the Mayflower Compact and the Constitution of 1787, and the document is today taught to school children as a sort of proto-Bill of Rights.
The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train
Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society’s highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan‘s Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffer.
Texas Creates Gold Depository As Next Step Toward Wider Use of Gold and Silver as Legal Tender
Joe Salerno earlier mentioned that Texas might create a new state-level gold depository that would allow investors to store gold and silver outside the federally-regulated banking system. As banks clamp down on storage of gold and silver at banks, the purpose of new Texan legislation was to encourage investors to move their precious metals to Texas and to perhaps even to begin to build a system of gold and silver “certificates” that could be traded as a type of money.
Gold and Economic Inequality
Inequality is a top news items for 2015 driven largely by the Baltimore riots, the minimum wage debate, Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and now the entry of socialist Bernie Sanders into the race for US president.
Introduction to the Fifth Edition
The Wall Street collapse of September–October 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it were among the most important events of the twentieth century. They made the Second World War possible, though not inevitable, and by undermining confidence in the efficacy of the market and the capitalist system, they helped to explain why the absurdly inefficient and murderous system of Soviet communism survived for so long.
Introduction to the Fourth Edition
There seems to be a cycle in new editions of this book. The second edition was published in the midst of the 1969–71 inflationary recession, the third in the mighty inflationary depression of 1973–75. The economy is now in the midst of another inflationary depression at least as severe, and perhaps even more so, than the 1973–75 contraction, which had been the worst since the 1930s.
Introduction to the Third Edition
America is now in the midst of a full-scale inflationary depression. The inflationary recession of 1969–71 has been quickly succeeded by a far more inflationary depression which began around November 1973, and skidded into a serious depression around the fall of 1974. Since that time, physical production has declined steadily and substantially, and the unemployment rate has risen to around 10 percent, and even higher in key industrial areas.
