Austrians do not question booms because they don’t like prosperity or because they have character defects. Rather, Austrians understand that booms involve lines of investment in areas of production that cannot be sustained.
The world's regimes have long been devoted to regulating every aspect of "health" in accordance with what central planners want. The covid panic offered them an opportunity to greatly expand these powers.
Social democrats love to denounce low-tax, probusiness regimes as "neoliberal" and as places with more poverty. But the reality is that parts of Europe that embraced markets most reduced poverty while making their citizens richer.
The deficit for the year is pushing $2 trillion. And we still have five months to go until the end of the fiscal year. Only during World War II were the deficits so huge in relation to GDP. Meanwhile, the Fed continues to print money to buy more Federal debt.
Some advocates of self-driving cars argue that their adoption would mean that very few people would actually own a vehicle anymore. We'd all just rent rides on self-driving Uber cars. This would be a dream come true for advocates of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders.
There is nothing new in a fiat-money central bank imposing an effective tax on the public’s holdings of government debt by manipulating interest rates. But few thought it could go on this long.
Perhaps reporter Michelle Kosinski is unaware that the Trump-era secrecy she denounced flourished mightily thanks to the beloved Obama administration. Kosinski’s mindset also helps explain why Americans' trust in the media has collapsed.
Seemingly endless amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus will keep prices rising in the near term. But if the banking sector and other bubble industries weaken, we will eventually see deflation as new loan activity lessens.
One of the most in-demand aspects of physical cash is that it is totally fungible. Every dollar is the same as every dollar. But cryptocurrencies can leave a digital trail which may lead to later problems in fungibility.
When it comes to the oligarchs' new semiconductor subsidy scheme, the real cost in terms of economic distortions, lost welfare, and harm to competitors, is quite real and beyond the dollar amounts we see in the subsidy itself.
