economics

[Editor’s note: this essay was found among Bettina Bien Greaves’s files. A note in her handwriting indicates that it was written in 1944 and that Mises used it in his 1959 seminar. In this short essay, Mises in his characteristically lucid and forceful manner goes over the basics of monetary theory and shows why the …

Anyone who has ever been to Japan knows: Japan is special. The country has many strange habits. The Japanese culture is simply different and many peculiarities are hardly understood in the West. But it’s not only the old established traditions that are foreign to us Westerners. Just as disturbing are social developments such as the …

Jean-Baptiste Say was a principled defender of the constitutionally limited state, even more consistently so than many of his classically liberal contemporaries. Having studied quite a lot of political economy over the past four decades, and critically, I must say that I consider A Treatise on Political Economy (1803)1 by Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832)2 to be …

One thing governments show us over and over again is their promises are almost always broken. This should concern us greatly since the “war” on COVID-19 will bring many promises from Congress that will never be realized but will cost us a lot of money anyway. Our federal government promised to balance the budget every …

It was the second week of January, and Robert F. Smith could see the economic damage in China wash across his computer screen in Denver. Weekly reports of tracking data from his more than 60 software companies showed that many Chinese businesses, particularly smaller ones, were slowly grinding to a halt as the coronavirus outbreak …

Because fascists have evil ends in mind, their malevolence is obvious. For socialists however, their ill intent is more insidious. In discussions of illiberal ideologies, socialists are frequently praised for being at least well-intentioned, if naive or ignorant—unlike fascists, who mean to cause harm to certain groups of people. While it goes without saying that fascists have …

Stephen Roach, Yale University senior fellow and former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, has a warning for US dollar bulls. The prominent economist says that the era of the US buck may be coming to an end and is forecasting a 35% decline soon in the US currency against its major rivals, citing increases in the …

Social justice is one of those squishy terms that is not easy to define. One thing we know for certain: social justice is not the same thing as justice, an age-old idea that was the focus of such thinkers as Aristotle, Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, and Hume. (After all, if social justice meant the …

The Great Crash of 2020 was not caused by a virus. It was precipitated by the virus, and made worse by the crazed decisions of governments around the world to shut down business and travel. But it was caused by economic fragility. The supposed greatest economy in US history actually was a walking sick man, …

CNBC reports that Sweden, which avoided a hardline lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, saw its economy grow in the first quarter.  The Swedish economy expanded at a far superior rate than many of its European counterparts over the first three months of the year, data published Friday showed, following the government’s decision not to impose …