Murray Rothbard remarks in his posthumous book The Progressive Era that it is in stark contrast to today that the 19th century was marked by party systems that were deeply ideological with a public that even cared about monetary policy. Today, that couldn’t be further from the truth. To interest people in discussions of monetary policy and central banking is akin to asking them to watch paint dry.
The Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) implemented by central banks during covid continues to provide real world examples of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). Murray Rothbard wrote, “…the artificial holding down of the bank loan rate below the profit rate will stimulate an excessive borrowing, artificially high levels of investment, and a continuing monetary and price inflation.”
Deal-making is said to be President Trump’s specialty, yet after five rounds of indirect talks with Iran – most recently just days ago – we seem as far away from an agreement as ever. The fifth round ended last Friday with no breakthrough, but at least no breakdown. However, each day that passes without a document signed on the table is another day for the neocons to maneuver the US president toward an attack on Iran.
Critics of the free market often claim that capitalism is a system of ruthless struggle for survival. They say it is a system of dog-eat-dog competition. In fact, as the great Ludwig von Mises argued in an unanswerable way, the free market replaces the struggle for survival found in the animal world with social cooperation in which everybody benefits. Capitalism is a system of peace, not war.
In the previous article, I discussed the social consequences of the welfare state; now I want to focus on inflation—or more precisely, on central bank policy. Inflation can broadly be defined as an artificial increase in the money supply that ultimately drives up prices, but this definition overlooks the fact that it is a process in which prices first rise in the capital goods of industries furthest from final consumption and then gradually spread throughout the entire system.
MAGA wants a single man to be able to raise taxes without any checks on this power. Fortunately, the courts disagreed.
While Austrian economists from Ludwig von Mises to Henry Hazlitt to Murray Rothbard have dealt with the various fallacies that John Maynard Keynes laid out in The General Theory and other works—and they are legion—only Rothbard chose to deal with the philosophical/moral aspects of Keynes’s viewpoints in Keynes, the Man, and he finds that these viewpoints indeed influenced his economic thinki
