Governments can pay their bills in three ways: taxes, debt, and inflation. The public usually recognizes the first two, for they are difficult to hide. But the third tends to go unnoticed by the public because it involves a slow and subtle reduction in the value of money, a policy usually unarticulated and complex in design.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mill’s famous essay “On Liberty.”
With the growth of Big Government over even more of our life, it is useful to remember and reflect on Mill’s warnings of the various types of tyranny that can threaten our freedom, and to emphasize more than Mill did the importance of the recognition and protection of private property rights if liberty is to be preserved.
Ford is busy touting the latest Consumer Reports ratings. It is entirely understandable. Ford (F) managed to achieve an expected reliability rating of “average or better than average” for 90% of its vehicles by 2010. Contrast this with GM’s pitiful 44% of vehicles achieving the same rating and Chrysler’s abysmal 38%.
Physicist Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, sent me a copy of his letter to the EPA about global warming. The text is also appended below, with permission.
[This article originally appeared in Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Fall 1999), pp. 3–51. It is also reprinted in A History of Money and Banking in the United States and as a monograph.]
I’m not sure if Holman Jenkins has been good all along, even in 2008, on the bailout and stimulus issue, but he sure is good now:
Members of the Obama administration have taken turns deploring the billions of dollars in year-end bonuses the finance industry is getting ready to hand out. Never mentioned is what they think firms should do with the money. Give it back to their customers? Spend it on office decorations?
