Mises Wire

The Mainstream View of Money Velocity

China has recently devalued its currency. Like many governments, the Chinese government thinks this will help the economy by increasing exports. But it will really just destroy real wealth in the process.

A selection from Chapter 42 of Economic Controversies.

An interesting theme in a 2014 documentary on electronic music (recently added to Netflix instant place), I Dream of Wires, is the tension between two different philosophies of developing electronic music technology. At the one end of the spectrum were the purist avant-garde musicians who worked primarily with very expensive and hard-to-use equipment that was a large departure from already established types of music-making. At the other end of the spectrum were the "commercial musicians" who wanted to make electronic music, but also wanted an interface that was easy to use.

Many governments — including the US — have often inhumanely forbidden families from supplying ransoms to kidnappers to save loved ones. The Obama administration recently, and correctly, suspended the practice of prosecuting families in these cases.

The crash of 1929 came after a decade of interventionist politics following world War I. "Free markets" were blamed anyway. Decades later, we pursue even more interventionism, and when it fails, we blame "free markets" all over again.

There's no Platonic laboratory where "pure" science happens independent of human ideas, motivations, and institutions.

Damian McBride is the former head of communications at the British treasury and former special adviser to Gordon Brown, erstwhile Prime Minister of

As news of Venezuela’s suffering keeps coming through, one cannot help but feel a certain sense of dread. All governments control the money supply to essentially the same extent that Maduro’s administration does. All around the world we have monetary socialism, where national currencies are subject solely to political power. And one cannot help but wonder (and fear) how many more such economic disasters it will take before it becomes clear that socialism of all shapes, sizes, and degrees, is unrealizable, unbearable, and unforgivable.