Imagine fathers at the little league baseball fence. The first brags, “My son is batting 200!” You should be thinking, “That’s not very good.” The second intones, “Oh yea, well my son is batting 175!” “Hold it,” you’re thinking, “this is going backwards.” And your suspicions are confirmed when the third yells out, even louder, “Here comes my son, batting 150!” 

To me, a wise and humane policy is occasionally to let inflation rise even when inflation is running above target.

—Janet Yellen

We have sighted the enemy and he is us.

—Pogo

Congress’ top priority this fall will be passing legislation funding the government and avoiding a “shutdown.” As of this writing, it appears unlikely that the Republican-controlled House will be able to make a deal with President Biden and the Senate Democrats on a long-term spending bill. Instead, they will likely pass a short-term funding bill to give themselves more time to reach agreement on a longer-term bill.

When Robert (Bob) Ekelund passed away Thursday, August 17, just short of his eighty-third birthday, the academic world lost a truly great economist, the world lost a talented artist and musician, and many of us lost a man who was a good friend. The Mises Institute also lost someone who was a fellow traveler with the Austrian school and someone who was a mentor to those of us who did our graduate work at Auburn University while tied in various ways to the institute.

In the following diagram, Jesús Huerta de Soto has summarized the actions people take to recover from a disaster when people are free.