Global Economy

Recorded from The Mises Circle in Phoenix, Arizona, April 10th, 2010. Sponsored by James M. Rodney.

For while the humanists would hear of no institutional check on state rule, one critical stumbling block still remained: Christian virtue. What was needed, then, to complete the development of absolutist theory, was a theoretician to fearlessly break the ethical chains that still bound the ruler to the claims of moral principle. That man was the Florentine bureaucrat Niccolò Machiavelli.

Economics is about human choice and action. The praxeological concept of time is not the concept of physics or biology.

In the long run, the religious "peace" of absolutist "moderation" turned out to be the peace of the grave for many Huguenots.

In the America of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration these categories and institutions were to have the opportunity which they were never fully to achieve in their constricted English home.

The international gold standard works without any action on the part of governments.

The problems involved will become discernible as soon as the wartime attitude in the United States toward financial and trade matters is replaced by a more realistic mentality.

The attempts to create a double standard of gold and silver failed lamentably.

"It is only when men are free that they begin to place a value on their time; and when men begin to place a value on human time, they begin to realize the importance of preserving human life."

Whether or not the US economy is "turning Japanese" is still an open question, but is becoming ever more likely as fake fixes are delaying painful economic adjustments.