WSJ: “As the U.S. economy struggles and flirts with the prospect of deflation, some central bank officials are publicly broaching a controversial idea: lifting inflation above the Fed’s informal target…. Both inside and outside the Fed, though, such an approach is controversial.

[This article, written in the year 1755, is excerpted from part 1, chapter 15 of An Essay on Economic Theory.]

Experience shows that trees, plants, and other kinds of vegetation can be increased to any quantity, to the extent that the land allocated to them can support.

A strange argument emerged overnight that illustrates how little even informed people understand about the market economy and its implications. This time the debate centers on a interesting case of a man in rural Tennessee who did not pay his fire-services fee, so the fire department let his house burn down. Here is the news report.

You can see that this incident is being used to attack libertarianism.

Video has been removed. 

The head of the Chicago Fed calls for inflation (“much more accommodation than we’ve put in place” so that “that the amount of excess savings that is taking place relative to investment is lowered”). One hundred percent (so far as I can tell) of the 175 comments at the WSJ’s report blast him for fallacious and dangerous thinking.

The New York Observer’s Joel Conason on the grim scenario of a Misesian world:

If the “Austrian” ideology prevailed in tearing down government, extirpating regulation and destroying public institutions, what would be left standing? Not much except giant corporations, mammoth banks and hedge funds, whose proprietors would then be able to completely dominate an increasingly impoverished, uneducated and undefended people.

[This excerpt from Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture discloses some plot details of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent]
 

Roy Cordato is Vice President for Research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, NC. The JLF is a public policy think that focuses on North Carolina state and local policy issues. He is also visiting faculty at NC State University where, under the auspices of a grant from the John William Pope Foundation, teaches “Political Economy of the Market Process,” a course which focuses on the economic and ethical foundations of a free market economy.