That was the solution proffered by eugenicist progressives during the 1920s and 1930s. At least, that was their preferred option. Frank Taussig admitted that we “have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform [the unemployed] once and for all, but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”
My anti-democracy critics will shake their heads in dismay at me, but I’ve been forced to come to the conclusion that there’s no reason to believe that plebiscitary democracy is any worse than the usual kind. Indeed, in American states that must hold plebiscites to authorize tax increases, one hears regular howls from the pro-tax crowd about how “direct democracy” is awful and that “representative democracy” is so much better.
“History has been rather kind to the American voter.”
ABSTRACT: The great recession that lingered after the meltdown of 2007–2009 brought macroeconomic theory into disrepute. Although the profession’s fascination with macro models deserves criticism, the fundamental evolutionary principles of macroeconomics remain sound.
It is generally held that for an economist to be able to assess the state of the economy, he requires macroeconomic indicators which will tell him what is going on. The question that arises is this: why is it necessary to know about the state of the overall economy? What purpose can such types of information serve?
Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1934, Ludwig von Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit first appeared in English. It remains one of the most important books on money and inflation penned in the twentieth century, and even eight decades later, it still offers the clearest analysis and understanding of booms and busts, inflations, and depressions.
Murray Rothbard always maintained that Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the teacher of Ludwig von Mises, was one of the greatest economists who ever lived. And Böhm-Bawerk‘s influence on Rothbard’s great treatise, Man, Economy and State was pervasive. Yet Böhm-Bawerk has never gotten his due, even from modern Austrian economists. Indeed prominent Austrians have referred to Böhm-Bawerk as a “Ricardian capital theorist” and to his project in capital theory as pointi
The Catalonian regional government has signaled that it plans to go ahead with a vote on secession from Spain on Sunday, November 9. The Spanish central government insists that the vote is illegal and the Spanish state will not recognize any vote for secession. (Such a blatantly anti-democratic move from a European government will prove to be interesting the next time the Spanish government waxes philosophical about the need to impose democracy in some foreign land.)
Friday marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like most historical events that are commemorated as if they took place on a single day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was just one of many interrelated events that led to the end of the system of Soviet client states in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Soviet Union itself, in December of 1991.
