Thanks to the growth of the state over time, political stakes have become much higher, and groups fear that they will be crushed by the other side if they lose. Crisis-induced cohesion is not a silver bullet, but rather a ticking time bomb.
In the latest installment of Understanding Money Mechanics, Robert Murphy explains what Bitcoin is, how it works, and how it fits into Misesian monetary theory.
With apologies to Frédéric Bastiat, this is how his great essay "The Seen and the Unseen" might read if applied to the current government-forced lockdowns forcing business owners into bankruptcy across America and the world.
The whole idea of government regulating so-called monopolies in order to promote competition is based on fallacies. If anything, such intervention only stifles market competition and lowers living standards.
New York and New Jersey have produced more COVID-19 deaths than the rest of the country combined. So politicians have repeatedly claimed that the nation is "two weeks behind New York" to drum up support for extreme lockdown measures.
We need to move beyond the stale platitudes of trying to fix politics in DC. The chattering class’s lamentation about the divisiveness of politics is frankly silly. In some ways, polarization is our friend.
The new Fed policy proposals being floated carry significant political risk, because they enjoy support not just from the redistributionist left, but also “business conservatives” happy to raid our future to make their pain stop.
It is fundamentally wrong to put the entire economy at the service of a single goal and to commit to a single solution. Human action always involves weighing up different goals and different means.
By protecting banks from the costs of poor investment decisions, central banks encourage further risk taking and malinvestment. They also prevent liquidation, which brings failed businesses' assets to the market at bargain prices, allowing new businesses to emerge from the detritus.
See what we've accomplished in the first quarter of 2020.
