One lesson from the United States’ Obamacare debacle has been that if Congress can’t get its way through regulation, it can always resort to taxes. At least that’s the Supreme Court’s view, after it declared the Affordable Care Act constitutional because it amounted to a tax, something that falls under the domain (apparently) of Congress.
So, now why all the commotion with Hungary using the same tack with the internet?
During the past two weeks, James Florio, a former Democratic governor of New Jersey, and Steve Lonegan, the 2013 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate wrote opposing op ed pieces on the gold standard for New Jersey’s leading newspaper. That the gold standard is now being seriously debated by state-level pols in a mainstream media outlet is a remarkable and welcome development.
Topic: Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises.
Reprinted from Mises.ca
The Swedish central bank Riksbanken has just lowered the interest rate to zero (yes, zero) percent, which was reported at a press conference in Stockholm today. This is a response to a couple of months of deflation, and with it enormous pressure from both politicians and Keynesian know-it-alls to quickly and massively lower interest rates. Of course, the interest rate was already very low and at zero it can get no lower. In other words, we’ve reached the zero bound. Why?
[This is a transcript from the September 22, 2014 episode of the Tom Woods Show, featuring Mateusz Machaj, former Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute, and founder of the Mises Institute of Poland.]
Frenchman Jean Tirole of the University of Toulouse won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for devising methods to improve regulation of industries dominated by a few large firms. According to Tirole, large firms undermine the efficient functioning of the market economy by being able to influence the prices and the quantity of products.
Consequently, this undermines the well being of individuals in the economy. On this way of thinking the inefficiency emerges as a result of the deviation from the ideal state of the market as depicted by the “perfect competition” framework.
