Venezuela is the fifty-seventh country to encounter hyperinflation in modern history. The economist Steve Hanke estimated — using the doctrine of purchasing power parity (PPP) — that the country’s monthly inflation exceeded 50 percent for more than thirty days in November 2016.
This week is the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. But, when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations while many Democrats clamor to fight Russia, it is worth reviewing World War One’s high hopes and dire results.
I met Daniel Lahoud in Rosario (Argentina) in 2008. He had submitted a very interesting paper to the International Conference I organize every two years – “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century.” From then on he had participated in every Austrian Conference with the exception of 2014. That year the economic situation in Venezuela was so awful that he could not make it.
In his writings, Professor Milton Friedman blamed central bank policies for causing the Great Depression. According to Friedman, the Federal Reserve failed to pump enough reserves into the banking system to prevent a collapse in the money stock.
In “How Capitalists Created a “War on Waste”,” Chris Calton did an excellent job of laying out how the “profit motive encourages the natural reduction of waste,” without requiring government coercion. Selling part of the output of a productive process that would otherwise be thrown away or require costly disposal is as much a source of profit as any other way of increasing revenue or decreasing costs. Further, he illustrated the power of those positive environmental incentives with multiple striking examples.
In his criticism of imperialist policies in the service of socialism, labor-unionism, and the socialist war economy Ludwig von Mises could not restate many conventional arguments. He faced an unprecedented task in confronting the claim that imperialism can enhance the welfare of a nation. His pioneering analysis brilliantly confirmed Carl Menger’s insight that methodological individualism is able to analyze even large collective phenomena.
Once they manage to get control of a state, socialists quickly set to work increasing state power as much as they can. One of the most useful tools in doing this is centralizing all political power within the state. This makes it easier to put all political power into the hands of the party and to carry out the goals of the socialist state.
One the other hand, laissez-faire liberals have long sought to prevent the accumulation of power in the hands of a few by decentralizing the state and the political system. Frequently, this takes the form of federalism.
Some of the French economists centered around the Journal des Economistes were elected officials. For example, Louis Wolowski was elected to the Assemblée Constitutionelle in 1848;1 so was juge de Paix Frédéric Bastiat.
