Mises Wire

The weird thing about dialectical materialism is that Marx seems to have cobbled it together from two philosophies that contradicted each other.

Price inflation is so difficult to predict, because there are so many moving parts: money supply, demand, money velocity, and supply of goods and services.

The Fed and other central banks are entering into a huge money-printing experiment in hopes of keeping the government-spending machine going at full speed forever. The unintended consequences will be highly destructive.

It seems that if you're mildly against the drug war and sky-high taxes, you're a "libertarian" to many left-wing commentators—even if you also support programs like "universal basic income" and renewable energy boondoggles.

In theory, it is possible to adjust inflation measures to account for the many constant changes in prices resulting from changing demand, quality, and innovations. But it's essentially impossible to execute these adjustments accurately.

Although national tragedies tend to bring a country together, it seems clear that the coronavirus will leave America as divided as it has been in modern history.

Lord Kelvin once said, “If you cannot measure it, then it is not science” and “your theory is apt to be based more upon imagination than upon knowledge.” This would certainly seem to apply to the many COVID-19 models now used to destroy human rights across the globe.

Can indifference be demonstrated in action?

The 1958 pandemic killed twice as many people as COVID-19 has so far. Yet, the economy in 2020 has collapsed far worse than either in 1958 or the far worse pandemic of 1918.

Thanks to past interventions, the economy is now rife with malinvestments and prices that don't reflect real demand. The solution is to allow deflation and other types of painful readjustment. Otherwise true growth will elude us.