A slight strengthening in the momentum of consumer expenditure has prompted many commentators to suggest that as long as the US consumer continues to spend there is no risk of a recession ahead. The yearly growth rate of consumer expenditure at current prices stood at 4.1% in July against 4% in June.

Notwithstanding still buoyant consumer expenditure, commentators have expressed concern due to a fall in the consumer sentiment index as compiled by the University of Michigan. The sentiment index fell to 89.8 in August from 98.4 in July and 96.2 in August last year.

John Cochrane has an entertaining and informative blog called “The Grumpy Economist,” offering insights centered in the Chicago School approach that nonetheless will resonate with the Austrian reader. However, in a recent post Cochrane erroneously claimed that people living in high-rent areas of California were effectively using a different currency than other Americans.

The US Constitution never granted the federal government authority to create a central bank. The Founders, having lived through hyperinflation themselves, understood that government should never have a printing press at its disposal. But from the very beginning of America’s founding, the desire for a crony central bank was strong.

In today’s political discussion, one of the fundamental principles our society is built on has been on the defense: private property rights and the protection of such rights. Just take the current debate about the housing shortage in Germany as a prime example. A very prominent policy proposal is flat-out expropriation of housing. Another one is the limitation of ownership of residential apartments.

The Macro Problem of Microtransactions: The Self-regulatory Challenges of Video Game Loot Boxes by Matthew McCaffrey has been published as a case study for Harvard Business Review.

Today is  Hans Hoppe’s birthday. He is an outstanding libertarian theorist, in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, and his strikingly original work ranges widely over philosophy, history, and economics. Among his many contributions are a defense of self-ownership and property rights through argumentation ethics and a trenchant criticism of democracy.  He is a scholar of the highest integrity and courage, and all lovers of liberty are in his debt.

When a woman in 2002 wrote a New York Times Magazine article on Americans adopting Ethiopian children, she mentioned my family, which has two Ethiopian boys. Just before the story was to be printed, someone from the newspaper called me, a “fact checker” who asked several questions trying to ensure that the story would be accurate and that no wrong information would leak into the account.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics:
AUSTRIAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY

Submission window: March 15 – April 15, 2020
Guest editor: Per Bylund, School of Entrepreneurship, Oklahoma State University

The U.S. government is infamously in debt. Since about 2012, the official national debt has equaled or exceeded the GDP.