Conventional wisdom says that savings is the amount of money left after monetary income was used for consumer outlays, implying that saving is synonymous with money. Hence, for a given consumer outlays an increase in money income implies more saving and thus more funding for investment. This in turn sets the platform for higher economic growth.

[This article appears online for the first time and is reprinted from The Alternative: An American Spectator (February 1975), where it appeared under the title “Ludwig von Mises.”]

The partial shutdown with the federal government has helped, perhaps more than any other recent political event, to illustrate some of the biggest problems that come with centralizing an ever-larger number of government activities within a single, centralized institution.

Were the US government more decentralized, we’d not now be facing a nationwide systemic failure that continues to cripple the private sector in many ways.

The online magazine Aeon currently features an outstanding article from our scholars Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss on the trend toward “bossless” business structures. Far from being redundant middlemen, they argue, good managers are needed more than ever even in firms that aspire to flat, decentralized, and democratic organization. 

During this partial government shutdown, it’s become nearly impossible to avoid news articles, and segments on television and radio outlining the many ways that federal employees are apparently suffering financially as a result of the partial government shutdown.

It is now commonly recognized that the majority of the economics profession for about four decades held an erroneous view of the nature of the “socialist calculation debate.” In particular, the nature of the arguments put forward by Mises and Hayek were misconstrued.

January 6 marked the anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, and January 11 marked the anniversary of his 1944 State of the Union address, where he expanded on what he saw as its meaning. That makes this an appropriate time to recognize the cognitive dissonance in FDR’s view of freedom, cited to this day as justification for expanding government power over Americans’ lives.

On the surface, an articulation of multiple freedoms would seem to be consistent with freedom for all. But FDR’s version was not.