Rothbard’s Legacy
It is natural to wonder what scholar today has inherited the mantle of Rothbard. To me this is the wrong way to look at it. Rothbard vastly broadened that mantle so that hundreds, thousands, and millions of people can wear it.
Treat Us Like Animals, Please!
I was just at the veterinarian’s office with a puppy, getting shots for the pooch and generally checking his health, dealing with fleas, and looking into this issue and that. The doctor spent quite the time with me and the dog, gave us free stuff, administered various shots, and helped in many ways.
The Distinction between Theory and History
Not all theories are moderately correct, and not all theoretical problems can be solved by asserting that each competing theory is partially valid. Some theories — even in economics — are just plain wrong; others are correct, regardless of the decade or century we are dealing with.
The Boom Is Worse than the Bust
The popularity of inflation and credit expansion, the ultimate source of the repeated attempts to render people prosperous by credit expansion, and thus the cause of the cyclical fluctuations of business, manifests itself clearly in the customary terminology. The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.
The “recession” now over, debt spirals upward
The national debt will soon be 100 percent of GDP. This isn’t a magic number, of course. Not a whole lot will be different than when the debt is 95 percent of GDP. But it does show that economic growth simply hasn’t been strong enough in the last decade to keep the debt below 100 percent in spite of all the claims that debt means nothing because growth will cancel it all out.
The Bloomberg article makes an interesting comment as well.
The Exploitation of Entrepreneurs
The wealth generators in our economy, entrepreneurs, are often exploited by the wealth destroyers, government officials. Somehow, politicians think it’s completely reasonable to exploit entrepreneurs in the name of preventing the potential exploitation of anyone else.
C + I + G = Baloney
The key fallacy embedded in Keynesian economics is the idea that government spending adds to an economy’s health. In reality, the opposite is true. So let’s bury that equation baloney and get back to work.
Refusing to Be Counted
Libertarians are often confronted by the difficult choice of how their principled rejection of state aggression should manifest itself in practice. In the case of the census, I decided to refuse to answer any questions.
Is Deflation in the United States Possible?
According to some analysts, a sharp decline in major commodity-price indexes has raised the specter of deflation. The Journal of Commerce’s index (JCOM) fell by 8.5% in May from April while the Commodity Research Bureau’s index (CRB) fell by 8.2% during that period. Also the growth momentum of these indexes plunged in May.
Laughing at the Regime
The Soviets created the most successful propaganda machine in the history of mankind. The most effective counter to this propaganda came not from professional Western ideologues but from popular jokes about communism.
