Mises Wire

The Fed isn’t here to take away the punch bowl anymore. The Fed is the punch bowl. 

When markets are mostly free, prices adjust freely and constantly to adapt to new realities. Yet Keynes failed to understand how market rigidities are caused by government intervention. He blamed markets instead.

Empowering state legislatures—or worse, the federal government—to abolish local regulations would be a grave mistake. 

Ultimately, we are responsible for ensuring our own security and our incentives are aligned with those of third parties with whom we can contract to assist us. In this regard, security is no different than many other desirable things. 

Political candidates are offering endless government spending and "free stuff" for everyone. But at the same time, governments appear incapable of performing even basic duties like ending street riots. 

The chronic US trade deficit is a direct result of the dollar’s status as the world’s main reserve currency and unabated monetary increases in government spending. More tariffs won't change that. 

Human beings do not have constant value scales, but change their goals constantly as the world around them changes. This habit of changing goals does not make a consumer "irrational."

Faced with a "join us or be destroyed" ultimatum from federal regulators or lawmakers, most private firms choose the "join us" option. 

The specific institutional conditions in 1936 Britain caused inflation to work as intended once, and not well. Stimulus policy today completely ignores these origins and has become a universal solvent to heal all economic ills.

Whether today's Great Monetary Inflation (which began in 2011) will end with sustained CPI inflation remains a wide-open question at this point. Prices could be reined in as in the 1990s, or a 1970s-style inflation could still be in store.