One of the pieces of legislation Ron Paul pushed while leading the Congressional committee overseeing monetary policy was a bill to audit the US gold reserves. As one may expect when dealing with the Fed, there has long been a general lack of transparency with America’s gold holdings. In fact, last year was the first time in over four decades that any member of Congress had been allowed inspect Fort Knox.
David Stockman brought some sanity to Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria earlier today. He blasted the hypocrisy of both parties on spending, warned of the dangers of rising bond yields, and called out the absurdity of US foreign policy.
[Excerpt from Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy Against the State, chap. 6: Deligitimizing the State.]
One of the cornerstones of the science of economics in its post-marginalist-revolution period is the realization that the necessity of ‘economizing’ – i.e., maximizing individual desire satisfaction whilst minimizing the exploitation of productive resources – stems from the fact that the said resources are not sufficient to satisfy all of the desires entertained by the totality of purposive agents (Menger 1976; Mises 1996, p. 93; Rothbard 2004, pp. 5-6).
Naïve inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of the money.”
~ Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit
It is hardly surprising that with equity indices stalling, the financial community is increasingly worried that the long, steady bull market is coming to an end. Naturally, this makes investors look for reasons to worry, and it turns out that there are indeed many things to worry about.
After closing at 1.051 at the end of December 2016, the price of the Euro in US dollar terms settled at 1.2321 at the end of March this year – an increase of 17.2%.
But, a currency exchange rate appears to be moving in response to so many factors that it makes it almost impossible to ascertain where the exchange rate is likely to be headed.
When I travel to Argentina, I often hear from politicians that the tax wedge must be increased because “revenues are insufficient”.
The first question that comes to mind is what does “insufficient” mean. Argentina’s fiscal deficit problem has not been generated by a low tax burden, but by a confiscatory and excessive one.
The Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum 2017-2018 shows that Argentina is ranked 92 among the 138 countries analyzed. The most worrisome aspect is that Argentina’s tax burden is the highest of the 138 economies.
“It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle-down,’” he [David Stockman] explained, “so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle-down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.” [William Greider, “What David Stockman Said,” Washington Post (Nov.
Congratulations to Mises Scholar Timothy Terrell for being named the T.B. Stackhouse Professor of Economics at Wofford College.
As Wofford notes, “The T.B. Stackhouse Endowed Professorship of Economics was established in 1949 by the Wofford Board of Trustees in memory of Stackhouse, who graduated from Wofford in 1880 and resided in Columbia, S.C.”
