Robert Luddy, winner of the 2007 Mises Entrepreneurship Award, writes in The News & Observer:
Tax Day is quickly approaching, which means that the absurdity of America’s corporate tax rate is on full display.
We all know about Milton Friedman’s money helicopter idiom and how President Obama’s architect in chief of Quantitative Easing used it to justify his “Great Monetary Experiment.” Less well known is Friedman’s idiom about daylight saving time, how he used this to illustrate the case for flexible exchange rates, and how it is now apparently justifying the plunge of money market rates in Europe to sub-zero levels.
Riched Ebeling this week employs a helpful analogy. He notes how free-market economists are often in the position of pointing out that various government regulations and subsidies — which government claims will make everyone better off — are actually a hindrance to economic prosperity for all.
Mises Daily Monday by Logan Albright:
The neo-mercantilist Export-Import Bank is being pushed with bipartisan support yet again. We’re being told that the Ex-Im Bank is good for private enterprise. It’s no doubt good for some private companies, but there’s a difference between private enterprise and free enterprise.
I am interviewed on Power Trading Radio about the Biggest Bank Heist in History, Cyber Security issues and my article on the Skyscraper Curse.
For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government’s schools spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and backward, while nationalism and centralization are made to seem progressive and inevitable.
The United States Export-Import Bank is scheduled to expire at the end of June 2015, and the elected representatives of both parties are tripping over themselves to reauthorize it, citing the importance of exports and strong private enterprise to the American economy.
We refer to the dollar as a “reserve currency” when referring to its use by other countries when settling their international trade accounts. For example, if Canada buys goods from China, China may prefer to be paid in US dollars rather than Canadian dollars. The US dollar is the more “marketable” money internationally, meaning that most countries will accept it in payment, so China can use its dollars to buy goods from other countries, not solely the US.
