Introduction

December 12, 2019 is the hundred-year anniversary of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.

The root causes of Chile’s ongoing protests are still being hotly debated. The conventional narrative is that a metro fare hike of 3.75 percent kicked off the demonstrations.

A decade ago, Democrat politicians and their cultural and academic allies were singing the praises of Hugo Chávez and his “economic miracle” in Venezuela. From Bernie Sanders to Salon, to Joseph Stiglitz and Sean Penn, Chávez’s version of socialism had transformed Venezuela, lifted up the poor, and set an example for the United States and Latin America.

In the United States, law courts routinely hand out court order mandating payments to victims. And then do little to enforce them.

Some Americans take New Year’s resolutions seriously. But over the years, I have been struck by how frequently the search for self-improvement ignores areas that would benefit people generally, not just a person as an individual. For instance, I hear of few people who resolve to advance liberty in the coming year or to give up their spot at the pig trough of government largesse in order to do so.

Japan has not recovered fully from the lost decade of the 1990s. The Asian financial crisis was exacerbated by the dot-com crash and then a few years later the global economic collapse.

As supermarkets are set on fire and churches are desecrated, Chile’s recent wave of protests have sullied the otherwise solid image of Latin America’s most stable democracy.

Prices are essential signals for coordinating the distribution of goods in an economy. Prices tell us where scarce resources are most needed. F. A. Hayek’s insights on this have been summarized by Peter Leeson: