The banking system in the United States today functions largely as a spy agency for the federal government. It is designed to assist federal agents with observing your every financial move, and it is assumed that every bank customer is a criminal. Such laws can be loosely described as falling under the “know your customer” schemes in which the feds have made it the job of financial institutions to assist the feds in surveillance of the public’s financial lives. 

Robert Wenzel writes: 

Robert Higgs recently published “Two Ideological Ships Passing in the Night” in the Jan 2015 issue of Econ Journal Watch.

For as long as political and ideological movements have sought to engage large followings, they have embraced slogans and catch phrases that give pithy expression to their views, aversions, and objectives. Slogans are dangerous in that they substitute rote declarations for serious thought, yet they may sometimes serve a purpose even for thoughtful people as rhetorical hammers with which one hits potential listeners in the head to get their attention. In any event, it seems that slogans and politicking are inseparable under both democratic and revolutionary conditions.

Obtaining a loan from the government now seems perfectly normal to most Americans, be the loans for education, business, healthcare, or whatever else.

Examples include Small Business Administration loans, where a potential business owner goes to the government to get startup cash, and student loans, where a college student borrows money for tuition or even living expenses. These loans can often be paid back with interest over the course of what is often several decades.

Mark Thornton explains to The Daily Caller what the ECB (and the Fed) are up to:

“The real economy is not helped with easy-money policies such as the ECB’s”, says Mark Thornton, economics PhD and Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute in Alabama.

Mark Thornton has been making the rounds as usual, with a variety of new podcast and radio interviews across the country. Here are the most recent links: 

The Economic Rock Star Podcast, Feb 9, 2015 

The Russ Belville Show, Feb. 6, 2015. 

Yesterday when I went for my infusion, I brought two items of reading material with me; The Wall Street Journal and the SSRN un-gated version of the Steve Horwitz’s forthcoming paper in the Spring 2015 issue of Social Philosophy and Policy, “Inequality, Mobility, and Being Poor in America.” The paper is one of the best summaries of a very common sense approaches to the data and the issue and is highly recommended to any who want to be well informed.

The old Keynesian idea that war is good for the economy is not taken seriously by anyone outside the New York Times op-ed page. But much of the discussion still focuses on macroeconomic effects (on aggregate demand, labor-force mobilization, etc.). The more important effects, as we’ve often discussed on these pages, are microeconomic —namely, resources are reallocated from higher-valued, civilian and commercial uses, to lower-valued, military and governmental uses.

Philipp Bagus writes: