When something valuable is mispriced at say zero, speculators appear to grease the wheels of commerce while earning a little something for themselves. This is all well and good until the government steps in to put a stop to the speculator’s arbitrage. The real issue is, “There were just too many diners for too few restaurants,” Appointment Trader founder Jonas Frey told Bloomberg. “I believe we’re serving a need.
Last week, a conversation with a waitress disturbed me a lot. She told me that she was homeschooling her sixteen-year old son, who is autistic, because she was afraid that he would be subjected to “tranny” propaganda and encouraged to “transition” to being a woman. Even worse, he might be put in touch with “doctors” who would mutilate him by injecting him with hormones and even castrating him, all without his parents’ knowledge. You might think the waitress was exaggerating—we all know that public schools are bad, but can they be that bad?
Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation?
With the world moving more and more in the direction of trade protectionism and war, it is worth remembering the origin of the fallacies upon which this movement is based.
In responding to economic fallacies that mainstream free traders make, the American Compass makes some of their own.
The culture wars are often depicted in the press as attacks launched by conservatives who are resistant to cultural change.
In attempting to counter Marxists, some libertarians inadvertently align themselves with statist institutions and support immoral war efforts.
Mainstream financial news today is replete with stories about “distress” in the commercial real estate market. But what is the precise nature of this distress, and what implications does it have for those outside of the respective industry or asset class? More importantly, what set of factors contributed to the distress, and what does that say about its potential alleviation?
[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 9: “Roots of Marxism: Messianic Communism,” section 3, “The Conspiracy of the Equals.”
