Mises Wire

The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting the meaning of terms into their opposite.

One of the most striking facts of world history: since about 1800, there has been an enormous increase in the average standard of living throughout the world. Before that date, almost everyone was poor, but then things changed.

The EU has long claimed vaccine procurement is a top priority. But even by Brussels's own standards, Brussels's central-planning schemes have failed to deliver yet again. 

During February 2021, year-over-year growth in the money supply was 39.1 percent. That makes February the eleventh month of remarkably high growth in the wake of unprecedented quantitative easing and "stimulus."

Trouble emerges once banks start to engage in lending unbacked by real savings, this gives rise to the expansion of credit out of “thin air.”  This in turn sets in motion the menace of the boom-bust cycle.

In Las Vegas, airline passengers plummeted 64 percent during 2020, and the convention business has collapsed. For Vegas, there are troubling signs that the world is not in a hurry to spend freely on extravagant face-to-face meetings. 

Shays' Rebellion was used by counterrevolutionaries like Alexander Hamilton to push the new centralist constitution of 1787. But Jefferson, on the contrary, concluded such uprisings were "medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

Government money printing may goose GDP, but It will do nothing to fix the losses that millions have suffered from covid restrictions and lockdowns. 

Lockdowns advocates claim fear of the virus is really what kept people home—and has thus led to the economic destruction of the past year. But they also claim that without forced lockdowns, people will quickly go back to normal. Both can't be true. 

The fact that colonial empires often differ significantly in their outcomes can serve to provide us with insights into what sorts of government policies are the most and least harmful.