The Fed

All of these things deny the true desires of people — as revealed in market prices — and substitute the opinions of the elite and politically-powerful for the true desires of people.

"When the government runs up a deficit to fund 'stimulus' projects, all that really means is that it is forcing taxpayers to pay for projects that they wouldn't buy with their own money."

Sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Houston, Texas; September 22-23, 1995.

We find ourselves enormously worse off, our economic prospects diminished greatly, and our liberties throttled more tightly by an even bigger Leviathan, with nothing to show for it on the upside but the further enrichment of a handful of big bankers and other malefactors of great wealth and power.

Sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Newport Beach, California; January 24-25, 1997.

Presented at the Mises Institute’s first conference, November 16-17, 1983; in Washington, DC.

Recorded in Houston, Texas; October 27, 1984.

Instead of permitting the necessary economic adjustments to be made in the wake of this unsustainable boom, the political classes — and their court economists — insist on even more government spending, more debt, and more destruction of the dollar.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the long effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

The Austrians (including me) who predicted these problems based on Greenspan's low-interest-rate policy know of course that the main cause was that low-interest-rate policy, with his numerous bailouts of failed financial institutions also creating a moral hazard that encouraged risky behavior.