The situation in the Middle East is growing more and more dangerous for the Americans stationed there. Two Navy SEALs are dead after being lost at sea off the coast of Somalia while searching a boat that was allegedly carrying weapons bound for Yemen.
Socialism: A Logical Introduction
Scott R. Sehon
Oxford University Press, 2024; 268 pp.
Philipp Bagus and I are delighted to announce the launch of a book series dedicated to advancing scholarship in Austrian Economics. We invite you to be a part of this exciting endeavor. The “Palgrave Studies in Austrian Economics” series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, gives prospective authors a prestigious outlet for their book-length manuscripts. Owned by Springer, one of the most reputable publishing houses of academic works, Palgrave is committed to promoting Austrian economics to wide audiences.
The government, federal or otherwise, has no business model because it is not a business. We know this at the outset because government does not compete in the market for people’s money, as every other business must do. With a monopoly of violence, it seizes the money it wants through taxes and monetary inflation. As long as the government doesn’t get carried away by taxing and inflating too much, most people—many of whom call themselves libertarians—regard this setup as necessary.
Adam Smith, in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, stipulates the guiding principles of classical economic orthodoxy, establishing guiding principles that will guide the English economic paradigm. Despite a tradition more focused on Colbertism (between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and physiocracy (from the eighteenth century onwards), classical economics managed to penetrate this French academic environment due to names such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.
As the Austrian School economists know full well, inflation distorts price signals unevenly. It may be tempting to try to filter out inflation from any given good or service to find its real price had the currency supply never been inflated in the first place, but this is impossible given the uneven effects. Inflationary effects on prices cannot truly be isolated and controlled for.
