During this year’s election cycle, the mainstream media has told us to believe that there is something shockingly nasty about the tone of this year’s contests. CNBC typifies this line of thinking with an article titled “Trump v Clinton: Why this election could be the nastiest in history.” 

What is interventionism? Interventionism means that the government does not restrict its activity to the preservation of order, or—as people used to say a hundred years ago—to “the production of security.” Interventionism means that the government wants to do more. It wants to interfere with market phenomena.

For all the hand-wringing about the threat to liberty and constitutional government posed by the major party presidential candidates, there is little discussion of how this threat is due to the political class’s long history of supporting expanded presidential power. There is also little talk of how the imperial presidency is just as much a creation of Congress as it is of power-hungry presidents.

Noah Smith has acknowledged the failings of mainstream macroeconomics, but he says that none of the “outside ideas” offer a better replacement. He failed to mention the Austrian school, but we can still show how the Austrian tradition parries his criticisms with ease.

A fall in the US velocity of money M2 to 1.44 in June from 1.51 in June last year and 2.2 in May 1997 has alarmed many experts. Note that the June figure is the lowest since January 1959 (see chart). Some commentators are of the view that this points to a severe liquidity crunch, which could culminate in a massive stock market collapse and an economic disaster in the months ahead.

45 years ago today, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon officially closed the gold window. While US citizens had been forbidden from owning gold or from redeeming their gold certificates for gold coins since the early 1930s, foreign governments still had the privilege of redeeming their dollars for gold. Due to the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy during the 1960s, foreign governments began to redeem more and more dollars for gold.

Writing in his 1922 treatise Socialism, Ludwig von Mises expressed support for democracy, but took a very limited view. Specifically, he suggested the only purpose of democracy is to “make peace, to avoid violent revolutions.” That is, democracy is purely a means to an end and its value lies in providing a way to remove agents of the state without the need to resort to military tools: “The essence of democracy is ... that  lawgivers and rulers ...

I have come to realize, since writing this essay, that I overweighted the contributions and importance of Adam Smith on the division of labor. And to my surprise, I did not sufficiently appreciate the contributions of Ludwig von Mises.

The authors of American Amnesia, well-known political scientists from Yale and Berkeley, argue that supporters of the free market have forgotten a fundamental truth. Defenders of the market often point to the “Great Fact,” as the distinguished economic historian Deirdre McCloskey terms it, i.e., the amazing increase in human well-being and wealth that began about two hundred years ago, when trade and production in parts of Europe and America became freer than ever before.

This week the world’s attention turned to Rio this week with Brazil’s Olympics games. As the biggest corporatist scam of all time, these games have cost the Brazilian people $12 billion dollars, most of it going to the pockets of the politically well connected.