Greece cannot pay its debts ... ever. Nor can several other members of the European Union. That’s why Europe’s elite are loath to place Greece in default. If Greece is allowed to abrogate its debts, why should any of the other debtor members of the EU pay up? The financial consequences of massive default by most of the EU members is hard to predict, but it won’t be pretty. Europe has built a financial house of cards, and the slightest loss of confidence will bring it crashing down.

Most modern socialists are in favor of inflation, because it is supposed, in Keynes’s words, to “euthanize the rentiers.” It doesn’t mean however, that the “founding fathers” of socialism were in favor of inflation. In fact, the opposite is true. Karl Marx had a wide knowledge of the economic literature and even though he’s usually wrong, he was correct in his preference for a gold standard.

Greece has defaulted on its debt to the International Monetary Fund, the first “developed” country to do so. But is Greece merely a casualty of a flawed eurozone or a canary in the coal mine?

The latest black eye for the mega-expensive F-35 warplane is a recent report noting the mediocrity of the plane in air combat situations:

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.