For the last decade (or more), Canadians have been ebullient about their home-grown housing boom. Home prices in Toronto have grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. New homeowners have rushed in to take advantage of what seems like a surefire path to riches.
One can make the case that in a thoroughly decentralized and anarchistic society, persons may find themselves in a state of practical near-quarantine because private owners of airlines, airports, lodging facilities, and even communities with private security may refuse entry or passage to persons suspected of being contagious. In such cases, persons would be restricted to places owned by themselves or by those who will agree to allow the person on the premises.
Michael Pollaro writing at Forbes.com reexamines the implilcations of the ending of Quantitative Easing policy by the Federal Reserve: “The lion’s share of the supposed economic strength we see today is both artificial and unsustainable because it is built on malinvestments born out of the monetary largesse underwritten by the Federal Reserve’s policies.
Coming in Monday’s Mises Daily, Patrick Barron will explore the moral hazard that often plagues collective security organizations like NATO. Why be careful, responsible, and restrained with your own defense when you can get the taxpayers in a foreign country to pay for it?
Today, the news from Europe illustrates this well. From today’s Open Europe news summary:
Sean Corrigan writes: “In its latest edition, in a piece entitled ‘Monetary Policy: Tight, Loose, Irrelevant’, the ineffably dire Ekonomista considers the work of three members of the Sloan School of Management who conducted a study of the factors which – according to the
Introduction
Economics, wrote Joseph Schumpeter, is “a big omnibus which contains many passengers of incommensurable interests and abilities.” That is, economists are an incoherent and ineffectual lot, and their reputation reflects it. Yet it need not be so, for the economist attempts to answer the most profound question regarding the material world.
The Austrian School
Also part of this mix, but in many ways apart from and above it, is the Austrian School. It is not a field within economics, but an alternative way of looking at the entire science. Whereas other schools rely primarily on idealized mathematical models of the economy, and suggest ways the government can make the world conform, Austrian theory is more realistic and thus more socially scientific.
High Points in the Austrian Tradition
In its twelve decades, the Austrian School has experienced different levels of prominence. It was central to the price theory debates before the turn of the century, to monetary economics in the first decade of the century, and to the controversy over socialism’s feasibility and the source of the business cycle in the 1920s and 1930s. The school fell into the background from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, and was usually mentioned only in history of economic thought texts.
Socialist Calculation
At the time of the business-cycle debate, Mises and Hayek were also involved in a controversy over socialism. In 1920, Mises had written one of the most important articles of the century: “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” followed by his book, Socialism. Until then, there had been many critiques of socialism, but none had challenged socialists to explain how their economy would actually work absent free prices and private property.
