As the economy faulters, socialists are getting elected, promising free goods and services and an end to the chaos. Even when they make things worse, however, they will still gain political power.
Governments take valuable things like paper and minerals, stamp something on them, and call them money, in the process rendering these things almost worthless. Something is wrong with this picture.
Karl Marx not only misunderstood value and production, but he also was wrong about large-scale and small-scale property owners.
Both progressives and conservatives show a complete unwillingness or inability to distinguish between those who got rich by genuinely creating value by serving others and those who are getting rich by expropriating wealth through force.
Political power over markets doesn’t just corrupt individuals—it corrupts the price system itself.
The recent death of Paul Ehrlich reminds us that his crackpot overpopulation theories still are with us, even as they are being regularly discredited.
John Stuart Mill is a study in contrasts. He wrote On Liberty, yet many of his ideas and theories promoted anything but liberty.
In 1871, the “discovery” of marginal economic analysis soon took a wrong turn, moving towards quantification, data, and mathematics. It is time to “rediscover” the margin, this time the margin as explained by Carl Menger.
From Monetarists to advocates of modern monetary theory, government edicts give money its value. Austrian economists from Menger to Mises to Rothbard know better.
In Graham Moore’s The Wealth of Shadows, John Maynard Keynes is a hero for his monetary manipulations. However, in the real world, the economics of Keynes has brought economic ruin.
