The Manichean President

Greenwald’s argument is a simple one: Because of the overwhelming military might of the United States, no other country can attack us without facing utter destruction. Other countries, wishing rationally to advance their own interests, grasp this fact.

Accordingly, they will neither attack us nor threaten us. A rational American foreign policy then to a large extent presents no difficulty. Military measures directed against other countries are unnecessary. Given the manifest costs of these measures, we should not undertake them.

We dearly need a dollar crisis

One of the claims made against the gold standard is that there has been more stability since we adopted a paper standard than when we were under gold. The unmentioned: the problems have been papered over at the expense of our savings and the dollar’s purchasing power. There has been a trade-off at work here. The more recessions are papered over, the less our money is worth. It’s true that the data reveal crises under a gold standard, but their frequency shows the opposite of what it seems.

The Other Side of the Transaction

To call enterprise a risk is really to understate the problem, writes Jeffrey Tucker. Entrepreneurs have a special capacity to discern the uncertain future but they possess no power to actually create that future. It could be that tomorrow morning, no one will show up at the grocery store. That could persist through the afternoon, and so on through the evening. The same could happen the next day and the next, until the company goes bankrupt. And how long will that take? It depends on how much money the owners are willing to lose in the course of betting on a profitable future. This crazy uncertainty of the future — a factor which we cannot overcome, no matter how much data we accumulate or how many fortune tellers we call upon — is a universal condition, always maddening and infuriating but completely unsolvable. It doesn’t change for rich or poor. The largest corporation and the smallest lemonade stand face this trial in precisely the same way. Neither knows what the future truly does hold.

Ron Paul vs. the Fed et al.

For 94 years, Americans were supposed to be awed and bored by the central bank, and pay no real attention to the greatest counterfeiting machine in the history of the world. Yet Ron has made an issue, and a huge one, out of the Federal Reserve and its destructivism and business cycles. Last month, 2,000 University of Michigan students cheered his calls for sound money by chanting “Gold, Gold, Gold.” And last night, as he was walking through National Airport, a man with a British accent approached him.

GG on Capital

Sorry to revisit the same topic so shortly, but in that same AA edition cited in my previous post, I simply cannot praise Garrett’s piece, entitled ‘Mythologies of Reconversion’, enough. This is not just a witheringly effective dismissal of the central planner’s and inflationist’s folies de grandeur, but one of the most evocative treatments you could wish for of what that much-misunderstood word ‘capital’ really means.

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