Today, Serbia does not enjoy a reputation as a free country. The philosophy of strong hand, top-down organization of society, a socialist understanding of economy, and fierce nationalism are its trademarks.

The legacy of socialism with a human face, of which I have written elsewhere, has entrenched a statist mentality among the population and has shaped the understanding of economics among the political and intellectual elite.

The philosopher Terrance Tomkow (1950-2024) passed away last Friday night, January 12, 2024.  He was best known as a philosopher of language and made important contributions to metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the free will problem. For most readers of the Mises page, though, what will probably be of most interest are his posts about the origin of property rights. These posts advance a new and philosophically deep theory that is broadly compatible with libertarianism.

To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of runaway inflation, we the people must take the money-supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy, with all monetary functions performed within the structure of the rights of private property and of the free-market economy.

We have already described one part of the contemporary flight from sound, free market money to statized and inflated money: the abolition of the gold standard by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and the substitution of fiat paper tickets by the Federal Reserve as our “monetary standard.” Another crucial part of this process was the federal cartelization of the nation’s banks through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the “free-market economy”; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts, exchange their goods for the goods of others.

The New York Federal Reserve released the results of its January Empire State Manufacturing Survey today, and the survey’s index fell to the lowest level reported since the covid panic in 2020. Moreover, if we exclude the covid recession, we find that January’s drop in the index is the largest reported in more than thirty years. 

According to the New York Fed’s summary: 

Late last week President Biden started a new US war on the tiny country of Yemen. US warships and fighter jets launched more than a hundred missiles at the country in a massive escalation that the Administration bizarrely claimed would “de-escalate” tensions in the Red Sea.