We hear plenty about threats to American democracy: Donald Trump’s a threat, the Republican party is a threat, and any number of other people or political parties are threats. Now it’s ExxonMobil’s purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources.
The recurring cycle of economic booms followed by inevitable busts has remained a puzzle for generations of observers. While mainstream Keynesian and monetarist theories propose monetary interventions to smooth these fluctuations, the Austrian School offers a compelling and alternative perspective. Austrian business cycle theory provides a profound understanding of how artificially inflated booms sow the seeds of their own destruction.
The results of Argentina’s presidential election have produced an interesting result in the recovery of the Peronist Sergio Massa from the primary election. While Javier Milei retained his 30 percent, Massa managed to convert his 21 percent into a respectable 37 percent, enough to snatch the election from the libertarian acandidate. Conservative Patricia Bullrich also experienced an improvement in her third position, from 17 percent to 24 percent.
Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age
by Naomi Wolf
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023; 232 pp.
[This article is the foreword to Stephan Kinsella’s, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)]
The question as to what is justice and what constitutes a just society is as old as philosophy itself. Indeed, it arises in everyday life even long before any systematic philosophizing is to begin.
Why are we using state money instead of market money? Put another way, why can’t we select the money we want to use? Cryptocurrencies are a market alternative, but they haven’t put state money out of business yet. If they ever threaten to do so, the state can prohibit them.
Fiscal explosion is not in the economic dictionary. But in the foreign exchange markets and bond markets this intuitive concept has sometimes powered a narrative which drives long-term US interest rates and the dollar upward in tandem. The puzzle to explain at such times, whether the early 1980s, or autumn 2023, is why the dollar shrugs off the inflation danger of so much red ink in the government accounts.
Quit College—or Better Yet, Don’t Even Start
When I was in university a decade ago, this was some wacky, contrarian advice. It wasn’t unheard of for intellectual, middle-class youngsters to opt out of college, and it was still the early days of efforts like Praxis, but realistically there didn’t seem to be any alternatives. So, I went to university because that’s where you learn things and become a grown-up . . . or something.
