Mises Wire

If today they come for the smoker, tomorrow they will come for you. Neo-Prohibitionism has been long on the march.

People must still compete for resources in a socialist economy. In fact, the competition is intense. On the other hand, thanks to markets, basic necessities—and even basic luxuries—are now more more accessible than ever. 

What matters for real economics is real savings, not increases in consumer spending driven by money printing. The best way to get an increase in savings is to decrease both money pumping and government spending. 

The impossibility theorem, developed by Nobel-winning economist Robert Mundell, paints a false tradeoff between the free movement of capital, fixed exchange rates, and effective monetary policy. Under a gold standard, all three are a possibility.

Now that Cuban president Raul Castro has resigned the presidency of Cuba, will the US government lift its six-decade economic embargo against Cuba? Don't bet on it.

The nationalists at the Constitutional Convention had so far carried the substance of their program: the creation of a supreme national government and a Congress empowered to veto state laws whenever Congress thought the states "incompetent." 

Contrary to what Krugman might argue, the growth of organized labor in the US workforce was much more the work of government prodding and outright coercion than it was a natural progression of the American workplace.

The central bank has basically destroyed the business of risk, and commercial real estate remains a looming disaster. As a result, banks aren't lending to regular people. The economy increasingly relies on little more than newly printed money. 

“When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”

It seems that governments want to convince us that they have saved the world when the reality is that the misguided lockdowns were the cause of the economic debacle and lifting them is the main cause of the recovery.