In a recent article, The Case Against Gold David Berman interviews a Canadian fund manager who is bearish for all of the wrong reasons. As do the vast majority of analysts and writers, he totally misunderstands how the gold price is formed.
One of the most important concepts in economic theory is the quantity of money. However, when going from theory to practical application, things get messy. In the real world, it’s not obvious how to count up the amount of “money” in the economy at any given time.
Yesterday I was a Guest panelist on Denise Howell’s This Week in Law, Episode 97, entitled “God Creates. We Patent.” TWiL is part of Leo Laporte’s impressive and growing private TWiT (This Week in Tech) netcast network (I regularly listen to the TWiT network’s This Week in Tech, MacBreak Weekly, and TWiL, in addition to my some of my other favorite podcasts, such as Mises podcasts, Lew Rockwell, and the Slate Culture Gabfest and Slate Political Gabfest.)
Here are some extra sources and readings from my talk:
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (visit his website) is the author of 11 books, including two New York Times bestsellers: Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
In my living memory, every socialist failure has been blamed on the weather. And so it is with the pathetic job growth figures in the U.S., which the New York Times attributes to “snowstorms.” Never mind the minimum wage, the payroll tax, the regulations, the mandated benefits, the dozens of agencies that add artificial costs and risks to the hiring process, the unions, and the vast governmental machinery that inhibits start ups. It’s really all the fault of mother nature.
Examples of a variant of what Mises termed the ultimate given regularly catch my attention.
According to Mises, “Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative.”
As I note in my post “The” Purpose of Patent Law, it is commonly said that “the” purpose of patent law is to incentivize innovation.
