One of my many favorite Hoppe quotes, from his Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order, Review of Austrian Economics, (Vol. 4 Num. 1), 1990, which explains why the relatively rich, Western countries, which have relatively liberal internal economic policies, would tend to be militarily more powerful, and thus more aggressive, than developing states.
And thus does the deficit soar to $427 billion. Whenever news stories dig up Fed officials, politicians, or bureaucrats who express grave concern about the deficit trend, we might imagine a group of thieves with a back up printing press worry about their spending habits. So long as they get away with it and believe they can evade the macro-consequences, their “concern” can only be affected and their will to stop it trumped by other more immediate concerns.
apropos nothing: from here:
I was sitting in my wife’s intro to philosophy class a while ago, and the professor was reviewing their first exam. He chided the students for relying on cutesy arguments against certain positions such as the following: “Relativism must be wrong, because if nothing is true or false, what of relativism?”
The professor warned the students that such self-referential arguments were very dangerous, and that a sharp opponent would make “mincemeat” of them if they weren’t careful.
Corresponding the other day with a Turkish attorney on a trademark law matter, he informed me: “In the meanwhile, Turkish currency has undergone some change. Six figures of zeros have been dropped for TRL1,000,000 to have the value of YTL1.00 in order to render the transactions practical.”
An interesting turn of events in the bond market. Fitch Ratings, desperate to be as recognized as the big boys — Moody’s and Standard & Poor — is holding the line on GM bond ratings. The US automaker, with $45.5bn of corporate debt, has been teetering on junk bond status, as speculation has long been that S&P would force GM bonds out of investment-grade status.
John Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man—the story of the dangerous relationship between economic consultants, US banks and corporations, the IMF, and the US military empire—has been on the New York Times bestseller list and is currently #14 on Amazon.com.
It was published November 2004.
LRC this morning runs a reprint of an interview with the author.
Many science textbooks contain similar one-or-two-paragraph histories of how modern science miraculously emerged from the dark swamp of ignorance we call the Middle Ages. The main problem with such stories is that they are almost entirely false. Let’s compare the picture painted above with the current understanding of scholars studying the history of the Scientific Revolution. [Full Article on LRC]
No, I’m not linking to somebody’s silly article on this topic, so that we can all make fun of him. For a few years now I’ve thought there were a few uncomfortable problems with subjective value theory (in the Austrian tradition, the only one with which I’m familiar), and Stephan Kinsella’s recent concerns about profit (on a private email list) prodded me to post this. (I’m not saying subjective value theory is wrong, just that I think there are a few holes that need to be plugged...)
Ex Ante vs. Ex Post Profit/Loss
