Mises Wire

According to Keynesians, wealth effects result from money creation, and they have a beneficial impact. The Keynesians are right that wealth effects exist. But they're wrong about who benefits.

Is the fact that other intelligent and well-informed people are antimarket reason for us to be less confident in our promarket convictions?

The economic nationalist faces a dilemma. Foreign aid handouts and economic protectionism are not only wholly compatible in theory, but the effects of foreign aid perfectly complement economic nationalists’ goals.

When it came to debating the morality and prudence of COVID lockdowns, their proponents had an ever-growing death toll statistic on their side. Those who feared the dark side of coerced lockdowns lacked the advantage of a dedicated government stat.

GDP is not a useful measure of the material prosperity of a nation, and the way GDP is measured tends to hide the benefits of free trade.

Every economic system is a mixture of market action and state control. The Marxist strategy is to blame every ill caused by state intervention on capitalism. 

Our current position on debt seems to be akin to saying the only way to keep from drowning is pouring more water over the victim.

Many libertarians, like Marx, are focused on economic freedom as the means to deliver liberty for all. Gramsci knew better, and he offers a lesson for libertarians who believe that broader cultural questions beyond the nonaggression principle are irrelevant for liberty.

Americans have been buying lots of guns out of fear of crime and unrest this year. This suggests that the crime-guns causality is the opposite of what gun controllers say. Rather than saying "guns cause crime," we should be saying "crime causes guns."

Debt is neither free nor irrelevant, as interventionists want us to believe, even if interest rates are low. More debt means less growth and a slower exit from the crisis, with lower productivity growth and a tepid employment improvement.