Obama’s recent trip to Beijing revealed that China is ready to begin the operations of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)—another international financial institution in the dazzling panoply of development banks—as early as next year. The AIIB is supposed to finance infrastructure projects in the Asia-Pacific region, in the ballpark of $8 trillion over the next decade.
One of the central tenets of progressivism has been that more democracy is the solution to “what is wrong with politics.” That is why progressives have aimed at circumventing limitations on popular opinion’s power over legislation and regulation, as if in response to Woodrow Wilson’s lament that “something intervenes between the people and the government…there must be some arm direct enough and strong enough to thrust aside the something that comes in the way,” and Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration that “I have scant patience with this talk of the tyranny of the majority.”
Hundreds of great photos from our sold out Mises Circle event in Southern California can be found here, including photos of Ron Paul, David Gordon, Lew Rockwell, and Judge Andrew Napolitano. Over 300 attendees participated in our energetic discussion of Society Without the State. Be sure to make plans now to join us in Houston in January!
Thorsten Polleit writes (originally in German):
“Market competition brings results that satisfy the wants of its participants. The market brings more goods and better goods at ever lower prices. And just as competition in the market for books, sneakers and crayons work well, so would a free market for money also work.
In a recent paper cited last month in The Economist, a trio of economists ran a kitchen sink’s worth of correlations on investment numbers. Kothari et al. concluded that profit growth and stock price boost investment, but that interest rates have a negative effect.
Although his main work was dedicated to a critique of socialism, Ludwig von Mises paid much attention to the analysis of what is known as the “mixed economy,” the “middle-of-the-road policy,” or “interventionism.” In Mises’s eyes, interventionism faced two main difficulties. On the one hand, interventionists could often themselves see that the outcomes of their interventions were even worse than the problem they intended to solve.
This talk was delivered at the Costa Mesa Mises Circle on Society Without the State, November 8, 2014.
The term “anarcho-capitalism” has, we might say, rather an arresting quality. But while the term itself may jolt the newcomer, the ideas it embodies are compelling and attractive, and represent the culmination of a long development of thought.
[From A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, first published in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.]
