The Causes of Price Inflation & Deflation: Fundamental Economic Principles the Deflationists Have Ignored

Abstract: In the inflation-deflation debate, deflationists view credit as the most important factor affecting prices. As far as they are concerned, the credit contraction of 2008 caused prices-in-general to fall, and prices will continue to fall unless bank lending resumes. But are these opinions based on a sound understanding of economics? The first part of this article examines the causes of price inflation and deflation from a theoretical perspective. The analysis is firmly in the Austrian tradition.

Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia

Liberalism, and the market forces it has traditionally championed, helped to undermine and overthrow the old order of the status society which characterized human social existence from the dawn of history up until around the eighteenth century. The old order still continues to exist in some places in the world and is not entirely vanquished even in the West. Still, the liberal revolution that occurred around the time of the eighteenth century promised to usher in a new order, replacing the status society with the contractual society.

Roger Williams’s Unintentional Contribution to the Creation of American Capitalism

Questioning the roots of capitalism is a favorite sport among historians and literary critics alike. Certainly the establishment of a trading colony by John Smith in Jamestown, Virginia may be nominated as the event responsible for introducing the concept of free-trade to the new world; but in the lasting religious/cultural influence of the puritans, a severe obstruction to the spread of capitalist economics through New England had taken root.

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