This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

Just as Professor Bernanke exits center stage at the end of Act I of the monetary comedy he created, the scene shifts to Frankfurt. The star of Act II is European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi. As we pick up the story, Mr. Draghi has been launching a defense against a phantom threat of deflation.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

Earlier this year Chris Kjorness described the importance of entrepreneurship in the rise of the Beatles. The Beatles became a global phenomenon when they arrived in the US fifty years ago, thanks to the entrepreneurial alertness and imagination of Brian Epstein.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

Today, many Christians feel it natural to adopt a brand of social conservatism when it comes to politics and public policy. Not only do we see them hold public demonstrations against what they view as social vices, they also usually call for legislation to regulate, control, and ban these activities.

Walter Block’s new book Toward a Libertarian Society covers a wide variety of topics from the death penalty to secession, and from war to macroeconomics. Dr. Block recently spoke with the Mises Institute about just a few of these.

Mises Institute: You say in your book that it is a contradiction in terms to be both libertarian and to be for an aggressive foreign policy. Why is this?

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Despite claims to the contrary in the mass media, Japan’s economy is continuing to suffer mightily under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Abe is from a famous family and he’s a convincing talker, so he was able to bamboozle people into believing that he could make Japan prosper with his three arrows. These metaphorical arrows stand for “monetary stimulus,” “fiscal stimulus,” and “structural reform.”

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

The Federal Reserve System of central banking was a response to the financial panics of 1903 and 1907 that rocked the US financial system. One of the key objectives, if not the only real one, was to counterbalance the nefarious nature of fractional reserve banking.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily.

From the left we often see tension between those who want to help the poor, and those who want to help the government. One recent example of this is the proposal to ban cash forwarded by Harvard’s Ken Rogoff.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

In a 2010 Bloomberg Television interview, Alan Greenspan said, “The general notion the Fed was propagator of the bubble by monetary policy does not hold up to the evidence. ... Everybody missed it — academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.”

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In Alabama last week, an estimated 900 union reps, politicians, local business owners, and their families rallied to raise awareness of supposed steel import dumping and how it threatens their way of life. They have a point.