Mises Wire

In the latest installment of Understanding Money Mechanics, Robert Murphy explains what Bitcoin is, how it works, and how it fits into Misesian monetary theory.

New York and New Jersey have produced more COVID-19 deaths than the rest of the country combined. So politicians have repeatedly claimed that the nation is "two weeks behind New York" to drum up support for extreme lockdown measures.

We need to move beyond the stale platitudes of trying to fix politics in DC. The chattering class’s lamentation about the divisiveness of politics is frankly silly. In some ways, polarization is our friend.

By protecting banks from the costs of poor investment decisions, central banks encourage further risk taking and malinvestment. They also prevent liquidation, which brings failed businesses' assets to the market at bargain prices, allowing new businesses to emerge from the detritus.

See what we've accomplished in the first quarter of 2020.

The new Fed policy proposals being floated carry significant political risk, because they enjoy support not just from the redistributionist left, but also “business conservatives” happy to raid our future to make their pain stop.

It is fundamentally wrong to put the entire economy at the service of a single goal and to commit to a single solution. Human action always involves weighing up different goals and different means.

As the debt bombs in Italy and Spain and France get worse, it increasingly looks like the eurozone will have to bail out a huge portion of the European economy. Either that, or break up the EU, provoking a new crisis.

"Saving lives versus saving money" comparisons confuse ends with means. The end of saving the economy is not to have more money. The end is to have resources necessary to preserve the lives and health of countless human beings.

Whether we're talking about gasoline or toilet paper, the details of how the good is produced are irrelevant to the fact that price controls cause shortages. Only price freedom ends them.