A few months ago, Carmen Dorobăţ and I wrote an article discussing Venezuela’s rapidly deteriorating economic situation. Since then, conditions in Venezuela have worsened, and in the last week political unrest has escalated quickly, with large protests of the Maduro government taking place in Caracas and elsewhere around the country.
Credit is a wonderful tool that can help advance the division of labor, thereby increasing productivity and prosperity. The granting of credit enables savers to spread their income over time, as they prefer. By taking out loans, investors can implement productive spending plans that they would be unable to afford using their own resources.
American political culture always seems to be “celebrating” the anniversary of something, be it JFK’s assassination (we just passed the 50th anniversary of that sad event) or the signing of some (mostly bad) legislation. The latest political activity to be enshrined with an anniversary is the so-called Stimulus, the $800 billion monstrosity passed five years ago ostensibly to “put America back to work.”
Mark Thornton responds to former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger’s claim that the legalization of marijuana is a disaster. Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
by Butler Shaffer
If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow. - Emile Zola
Obviously, Mises could not anticipate the specific conflict now at work in the Ukraine, but here we see the sorts of conflics we have witnessed time and time again within multiethnic countries, in two or more groups fight over control of the central state which enables one ethnic or linguistic group the ability to crush another.
Dick Langlois points us to an interesting NBER paper on self-selection into government service, the results of which will surprise few readers of this blog:
Fred Sheehan discusses whether the Fed has passed the point of no return with respect to credit expansion:
The central teachings of Austrian economics are commonly understood. It is the hieroglyphics called “economics” at colleges today that is rubbish. It will join the ash heap of history. T
This paper originally published in the Austrian Economics Newsletter (Auburn: The Mises Institute) Summer 1991, pp. 1-6.
