Economist Kurt Richebächer’s article A Grotesque Misnomer [link, scroll about 2/3 of the way down the web page to find the start of the article] ridicules the idea that a central bank policy aiming at inflating asset prices constitutes a form of wealth creation. Wealth ultimately is the ability to consume more goods, which can only be produced by more capital, which requires more savings.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a faraway place (actually, a contrary-to-fact made-up one), there lived a group of human beings without benefit of government. Any government at all. How did they manage?
Oh, the hypocrisies of the socialist left, which argues that the free market is not self-sustaining even while it blasts any big business that has accepted help from government. The latest attack on Wal-Mart is an example.
A response to Caroline Baum’s column on Bloomberg, in which she argues that higher prices are neutral to the market:
On the recieving end, war causes businesses to lose inventory, employees, capital goods and simply put, valuable property. Additionally, funding the construction of missiles, tanks, carriers and other such warring goods requires the diversion of productive capital into inefficient and unproductive industries (the utility of a tank on a farm is roughly the same as a tractor on a battlefield). Iraq war’s costs spiral beyond 1991 Gulf War:
Wired News informs us that the U.S. May Get a Privacy Czar. [former chief privacy officer under Clinton] Swire said in addition to establishing federal privacy oversight, the bill would help “broaden the national debate on privacy so that it’s harder to slip into a surveillance state.” Mr.
I thought some people here might be interested in one of the latest absurd claims floating around. The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s President, Ken Brown, has declared that Linus wasn’t really the creator of Linux, but stole it.
To try to back up his absurd claim, Brown tried to go to interview Andy Tanenbaum, the creator of MINIX. Brown did not bother to interview Linus Torvalds, the person he’s accusing of intellectual thievery, before launching his criticisms.
In a speech by Swiss banker Ferdinand Lips, he discusses the abandonment of the gold standard and the consequences for the world economy. Lips is the author of the book Gold Wars: The Battle Against Sound Money As Seen from a Swiss Perspective, which chronicles how what was once the world’s soundest national currency became much less so.
