Mises Daily Friday by Louis Rouanet:
Largely forgotten in the English-speaking world today, French laissez-faire economist Michel Chevalier was an early opponent of patents, which he dismissed as a type of monopoly and an obstacle to technological and intellectual progress.
In this first installment of a two-part interview, Jeff Deist and Joseph T. Salerno discuss the health and vitality of the Austrian school, the impact of the South Royalton conference, Joe’s relationship with and memories of Rothbard, and why so many factions seem to persist within Austrian economics.
Militarism and military spending are everywhere on the rise, as the new Cold War propaganda seems to be paying off. The new “threats” that are being hyped bring big profits to military contractors and the network of think tanks they pay to produce pro-war propaganda.
Here are just a few examples:
We often focus on the fact that abolishing cash abolishes the last remnants of financial privacy. But of course, abolishing cash also increases the Fed’s ability to manipulate the economy with negative interest rates.
Sometimes one finds true gems in one’s archives. Recently I came across a speech by then-chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, from May 18, 2013. It was the commencement speech at Bard College at Simon´s Rock, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In it, Bernanke chose to forget for a while the dire straits the Western economy is in and focused on prospects for economic growth in the long run, which he defined as “measured in decades, not months or quarters.”
[Adapted from a lecture presented at the Mises Institute’s Sound Money Conference, April 10, 2014.]
The word “inflation” means different things to different people. One popular conception of inflation focuses on prices — all prices, actually. For these people, including some economists, “inflation” means a rise in the general price level, i.e., the goods and services we buy have higher price tags.
Michel Chevalier (1806–1879) was a very influential French economist during the second half of the nineteenth century. He is still widely known in France for being the architect of the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 which was the free-trade agreement between France and Great Britain.
In the context of the financial crisis, and the government’s ever expanding fiscal deficit, it is perhaps no surprise that the issue of taxation has become one of the most hotly debated topics in the United Kingdom’s upcoming election. Nor is it surprising that the establishment has successfully avoided any discussion of what makes dealing with the deficit so imperative, namely, the taxpayer bailout of the banking system.
