It's not necessary to completely destroy capitalism to impoverish us irrevocably. The further a regime moves in the direction of the "egalitarian" states of the old communist world, the worse the impoverishment will be.
In the 20th century, the US regime started refusing to recognize other regimes that failed to pass a morality test. But what was "moral" was never clear since FDR enthusiastically supported the blood-soaked Soviet regime under Stalin.
The history of poverty is almost the history of mankind. The ancient writers have left us few specific accounts of it because they took it for granted. It was the normal lot.
Much of the media discussion around the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall will focus on American military politics and the politicians of the time. But to truly understand why the Soviet system in Eastern Europe collapsed, we must look to Mises's pioneering work on economic planning.
"It may well be, that is, that the Bolsheviks had never had the slightest idea of what their aims would mean concretely for the economic life of Russia, how those aims would of necessity have to be implemented, or what the consequences would be."
Unfortunately, some people prefer to attribute the cause of inflation not to an increase in the quantity of money but to the rise in prices.
The theory of class conflict did not begin with Karl Marx. It began with two French libertarians, and James Mill developed a similar theory in the 1820s and 1830s.
Free-market economists don't run the world, and book reviewers at the NYT should stop pretending they do.
As it celebrates 70 years of the "People's Republic," China shouldn't forget its rise was made possible by its turn away from communism.
State intervention and a crushing fiscal policy made the whole empire groan under the yoke; more than once, both poor men and rich prayed that the barbarians would deliver them from it.
