Mises Wire

The war against cash has, up to now, been waged almost exclusively by national governments and official international organizations, although there are exceptions.  Now the war has acquired a powerful new ally in Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. and a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase and Co., according to Forbes, the world's third largest public company.   Of course , it is hardly surprising that a crony capitalist fractional-reserve bank, which received $25 billion in bailout loans from the U.S. Treasury, should want to curry favor with its regulators and  political masters and, in the process, ensure its own stability by helping to stamp out the use of cash. 

If the Venezuelan example of socialism’s ultimate consequences baffles anybody, it is because of how little (economic) history people remember, and how quickly its lessons are forgotten.

Writes Xiong Yue:

The translation of the Chinese version of In Defense of Deflation by Prof.Philipp Bagus has been finished.

One of the most pervasive and dangerous myths of our time is that military spending benefits an economy. This could not be further from the truth. Such spending benefits a thin layer of well-connected and well-paid elites. It diverts scarce resources from meeting the needs and desires of a population and channels them into manufacturing tools of destruction.

In this first installment of a two-part interview, Jeff Deist and Joseph T. Salerno discuss the health and vitality of the Austrian school, the impact of the South Royalton conference, Joe's relationship with and memories of Rothbard, and why so many factions seem to persist within Austrian economics. 

Mises Daily Friday by Louis Rouanet:

Largely forgotten in the English-speaking world today, French laissez-faire economist Michel Chevalier was an early opponent of patents, which he dismissed as a type of monopoly and an obstacle to technological and intellectual progress.

With the excitement surrounding yesterday’s release of J.J. Abram’s new Star Wars trailer, it is worth taking a look back to one of the best pieces of economic satire since Frédéric Bastiat’s famed Candlemakers’ Petition.

We often focus on the fact that abolishing cash abolishes the last remnants of financial privacy. But of course, abolishing cash also increases the Fed's ability to manipulate the economy with negative interest rates. 

Philipp Bagus, author of The Tragedy of the Euro, has completed a new book In Defense of Deflation, now available at Amazon. 

Here's a quick list of tax readings from the Mises Institute.