Why shouldn't the worker who is willing to render the best services for the least pay be the one who gets the job? Instinctively, most of us recoil in disgust at the suggestion that wages should reflect nothing more than the cold calculus of supply and demand. Yet few of us realize just how essential this "cold calculus" is for the long-run welfare of laborers themselves.
The significance of Jesús Huerta de Soto's new 681-page book, Dinero, crédito bancario y ciclos económicos (Money, bank credit, and business cycles), is precisely that it is the first Misesian treatise on money and banking to appear since the publication of Mises's original work, Theory of Money and Credit, eighty-eight years ago. De Soto's work is the most comprehensive analysis of fractional-reserve banking and of business cycles in print.
Debt is great on the way up. You buy a house or buy stocks and they rise and your debt stays the same, accruing as it does some interest rate that is well below the rate of your advancing stocks and appreciating home. But when prices fall, debt becomes a very cruel master.
The introduction of the euro consists simply of introducing another "managed" paper currency. Whether it will go up or down against other currencies will continue to depend on how it and the other ones are managed.
Since the government's rules for money creation are not working, it seems that the only plan of action that today's Keynesian economists should accept is for government to make counterfeiting legal. Lest anyone think this is silly, imagine the "stimulus" benefits that counterfeiting would produce.
Watchdog groups are correct to monitor the disbursement of the Red Cross's September 11 donations. And the issue of appropriate uses of charitable funds promoted for a particular purpose must be addressed. But the same issue should be raised about innumerable government initiatives whose claimed goals are also undermined by the same diversion of resources.
Gold is the antidote to inflationary money. Gold, its advocates have said through the centuries, protects an individual against the damage caused by the disease called inflation that is created by central banks. Gregory Bresiger reviews Peter Bernstein's attempt to debunk: The Power of Gold: History of an Obsession.
Making the boom continue at home and abroad has been the prime focus of U.S. monetary policy for quite some time. But among the unintended consequences emerge the broadly based lowering of perceived risk levels in the financial markets and a global spread of careless investment activities.
We will never resort to a bailout, said the Bush administration concerning the financial failures of the Argentinian government. That was one week before the same administration arranged an $8 billion line of credit for the same government.
