Government jobs may help reduce the official unemployment rate, but they actually damage the economy. After all, most government workers are employed in the business of redistributing wealth and regulating private property.
Mises argues that the nation has a fundamental and relatively permanent being independent of the transient state (or states) which may govern it at any given time. Thus he refers to the nation as “an organic entity [which] can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states.”
"Efficiency" has largely been demoted from a useful term of analysis and insight to little more than another warning that the government is about to rip you off with another redistribution scheme.
Quantitative methods are indeed useful and enlightening in the fields of economic history and descriptive economics. For Mises, however, these fields do not fall within the field of economics, narrowly understood.
Elizabeth Warren has decided that bitcoin mining uses "too much" electricity. This raises an important question: Is Senator Warren qualified to decide on the "correct" amount of electricity usage?
Thanks to so many government restrictions on the use of potential monies that aren’t the dollar, we can only guess as to what the relationship between dollars and bitcoin would be in a functioning marketplace. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Without a coherent theory, it is not possible to begin to understand the causes of business cycle and no amount of data torturing by means of the most advanced mathematical methods will do the trick.
We've seen pictures of empty shelves in Venezuela. Meantime, the one-year return on the Caracas stock exchange is 1,804.92 percent. If you're already rich in assets, inflation is a big nothing burger. But it's a problem if you're poor.
Governments always justify printing more money with the excuse that there is no inflation. When inflation rises, they say it is transitory. And when inflation soars, governments blame businesses and shop owners, presenting themselves as the solution with “price controls.”
The covid panic brought an end to due process in many ways. Among these are the end of speedy trials and the end of a timely hearing for landlords to obtain evictions. Meanwhile, governments have seized private businesses with no due process at all.
