Mark Thornton presents a Misesian commentary on why politics is to blame for the impending U.S. government “shutdown,” and how a gold standard could provide real fiscal discipline.

Many argue the bigger the boom the greater the bust. More correct is: The bigger the boom, the greater the mis-direction of production – over consumption, and malinvestment. How devastating the bust becomes depends more on the degree of interventions which impede recovery. Thus, the greater the interventions in the economy that prevent resource re-allocation and adjustment to malinvestments and consumed capital, the more severe the bust, the slower the recovery and the greater the possibility of a renewed boom-bust.

See:

Retired Canadian economist David Laidler is interviewed by Russ Roberts on EconTalk. It is a wide ranging interview where monetarism and the financial crisis are discussed. Laidler at several points, including around the 20 minute mark says that it was the Austrians who got it right in both 1929 and 2005 and the monetarists just missed it both times. He even admits that he can say such things because he is retired and doesn’t have to face the wrath of journal editors for his remarks.

The U.S. government and the establishment media are in a quandary. How are they to explain the heinous attack on a Kenyan shopping mall by Al Shabab a militant Somali group with links to al-Qaida which left 59 innocent civilians dead and another 175 injured, with the victims ranging in age from  2 to 79 years old? After all, since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, U.S politicians of all stripes have repeatedly hammered home the message that “fundamentalist” Islamists hate us and want to kill us simply because we are free and prosperous.

Writes John Carney at CNBC:

One of the odder claims made aboutBitcoins that you hear from time to time is that there can’t be fractional reserve banking in the electronic currency.

This is supposedly one of the appealing features of Bitcoin because, well, because some libertarian types think that fractional reserve lending is a form of fraud. Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian economist, was probably the most notable proponent of this view.

It’s always interesting to see who is invoking the name of Ludwig von Mises to make a political point. A few weeks ago, Peter Beinart was claiming, rather unconvincingly, that Senator Ted Cruz is some kind of devout anti-interventionist because he allegedly read books by Ludwig von Mises as a teenager.

Expanding on his Circle Bastiat post from earlier this week, Peter Klein writes at LewRockwell.com:

Those of us who favor the free market must confront a problem. The virtues of the market, and the vices of socialism and interventionism, have been made incontestably clear by Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, and others. The case for the free market, as these great figures explain it, can readily be grasped and demands no esoteric knowledge. Yet many academics reject the market. They condemn capitalism for leaving many in poverty and for glaring inequalities. How can so many academics fail to grasp what seem to us obvious truths?