Neither voters nor politicians watch the bureaucracy very carefully, so they respond as one might expect—advancing their own and their favorites' interests, at the expense of the public they are supposedly working for.
The possibility that someone might pose a threat to another at a future time is not sufficient reason to revoke a person's property rights.
There's now no difference between monetary policy and other government programs designed to prop up firms, industries, and other favored groups. The Fed is simply another government planning agency.
The state currently enjoys a vastly unbalanced share of the power within a society, such an arrangement is not in any way preordained, and the assumption that it must be betrays a narrowness of vision and a lack of historical knowledge.
Governments often demand that you "ask what you can do for your country," but those governments never guarantee us anything in return for our sacrifice.
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.
