Earlier this week I returned a pair of indoor/outdoor heated slippers that I purchased online from a niche retailer as a Christmas present for my wife. The problem was that they resembled outdoor boots more than they did indoor slippers. As I started to search for the retailer’s policy on returns, I steeled myself for a time-consuming and costly process of perusing ambiguous and closely packed text and then undertaking the arduous and messy task of repackaging the item and engaging a shipper to return it. As it turned out, the return process was a breeze. 

As the Austrian School has pointed out, the ultimate source of human poverty and failure lies in poor logic.

Here is an example from Forbes Magazine and a leading hedge fund investor who is also a major charitable donor genuinely devoted to helping humanity and the planet.

The editor of Forbes, Randall Lane, quotes Paul Tudor Jones, as follows: 

Once upon a time there was a northern, medieval phenomenon as much the subject of universal myth and curiosity as that of the enchantress city-republics flourishing down south: the Hanseatic League of the mid-13th to 16th centuries. “The Hansa“ (old German for “associations“) or “The League,“ as it was known, began as a treaty between Lübeck and Hamburg “to clear the road of pirates and robbers between the Elbe and the Trave“ [a river in northern Germany with its delta at the Baltic sea].

Yugoslavia was a communist country from the end of World War II until its bloody breakup in 1991. In the years directly following the war, it was as brutal as any communist regime — it repossessed property and jailed or killed whoever uttered a word against Marxist ideology. However, in the decades after the 1940s — especially in the 70s — it was the most liberal communist country in the world. In sharp contrast to the Soviet Union, this Balkan state enjoyed a dose of economic freedom that the average Russian could only dream of.

In 2015, the federal government (namely, the FCC) implemented new monopolistic regulations which it called “net neutrality.” In 2017, the FCC then repealed some of these regulations. In the weeks and months preceding the repeal, various billionaires and other leftists hysterically predicted that the end of net neutrality would usher in a dystopia in which only the super rich could access the internet. 

The recent elections in the Eurozone have shown that the risks to the European project remain. In Germany, an insufficient victory from Merkel, the collapse of the social democrats and the rise of the alternative right and extreme left have surprised many.

Based on how frequently the subject came up with friends and families during the holidays, I have a feeling that the topic of cryptocurrencies will not be going away in 2018. 

One question I see frequently raised in online Austrian circles is how Bitcoin and other crypto fit with Mises’s regression thereom, and so I wanted to share a great blog post by Bob Murphy in 2014 on this topic to help clarify the subject for any interested readers:

Nowadays, rarely a week goes by free from news about the so-called gender pay gap. There is even now a “wage-gap day“ on November 10.  This is the day when women allegedly start to work for free for the rest of the year. The remaining 51 days are 14% of the year — a figure corresponding to the wage gap between women and men.