Pierre Desrochers is a professor of geography at University of Toronto. His research interests are economic development, technological innovation, business-environment interactions, energy policy and food policy.
Visa and MasterCard were slammed yesterday by the announcement of the Fed’s new price controls on swipe fees for merchants using the cards. This regulation is obviously horrible for consumers and producers and issuers – it is just bad all around and represents a backward step in economic progress.
If the legitimacy of the state arises from the people’s consent, then the prospects for a free society largely depend on the psychological processes of the individual members of society. That is to say, if people’s psychological processes are designed for a social order in which there exists an institution that uses force to acquire resources and that monopolizes protection and defense — to use Rothbard’s description of the state — then the prospects of a free society stand little chance.
In last Monday’s article I discussed Jim Manzi’s debate with economist Karl Smith. I pointed out that Smith’s evidence in favor of mainstream macroeconomic models was actually consistent with the view that fiscal and monetary “stimulus” policies only stoke economic crises.
The generic gold standard may be briefly defined as a monetary system where the unit of value — in terms of which prices, wages, and debts are customarily expressed and paid — consists of the value of a fixed quantity of gold in a large international market.
Recently, Ben Bernanke indicated that Quantitative Easing II (QE2) might be followed by QE3, etc. In an interview at the beginning of December, Bernanke was asked, “Do you anticipate a scenario in which you would commit to more than $600 billion?”
Bernanke’s answer was startling. “Oh, it’s certainly possible,” he said. “And again, it depends on the efficacy of the program. It depends on inflation. And finally it depends on how the economy looks.”
