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In the latest episode in the global War on Cash , Uruguay will ban all cash transactions for more than US$5,000.  The law is set to take effect May 2015 and also mandates that all taxes, no matter how small the sum owed, must be paid electronically. HT to Nick

Not Morgan Reynolds.  The eminent labor economist has  an insightful and unsentimental   review of sociologist Jake Rosenfeld’s lament about diminishing union power in Barron’s. (Scroll down to find

FBI statistics reveal  that over the eight years concluding with 2011, the number of bank robberies in the U.S.  fell dramatically, declining from 7,500 in 2004 to 5,000 in 2011. During the same period the total cash haul from bank robberies dropped even more precipitously from $78 million to $37 million. The sharply downward trend appears to be

In a must-read post on Zero-Hedge, Tyler Durden highlights Guido Hülsmann’s neglected 2003 article “ Has Fractional-Reserve Banking Really Passed the Market Test? ” Durden lauds the article and predicts that it “may prove to be the most revolutionary essay in the history of monetary economics and banking, if only it receives the level of appraisal

In his recent three-part interview ( here , here and here ) on the gold standard, Larry White perplexes almost as much as he enlightens.  Let’s critically review  his responses to a few of the interviewer’s questions. First, when queried about evolution of the discussion of the gold standard among classical liberals including Austrian economists

During the past two weeks, James Florio, a former Democratic governor of New Jersey, and Steve Lonegan, the 2013 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate  wrote opposing op ed pieces on the gold standard for New Jersey’s leading newspaper. That the gold standard is now being seriously debated by state-level pols in a mainstream media outlet is a

Adapted from “ Imperialism and the Logic of War Making .” All governments past and present, regardless of their formal organization, involve the rule of the many by the few. In other words, all governments are fundamentally oligarchic. The reasons are twofold. First, governments are nonproductive organizations and can only subsist by extracting

Jeff Peshut of RealForecasts.com  gives an insightful analysis of the likely effect of the termination of the Fed’s QE programs on TMS , the money supply aggregate formulated by Murray Rothbard and myself and regularly calculated by Michael Pollaro . Peshut shows that the three rounds of QE succeeded  in dramatically increasing the growth rate of

Zero Hedge explains the scam that is Hedonic Quality Adjustments wherein the Bureau of Labor Statistics manipulates price data so that  large increases in the actual prices of certain products can be transformed into decreasing prices when calculating the Consumer Price

Michael Vick filed for bankruptcy in July 2008, while serving time in Leavenworth federal prison for participation in an illegal dog-fighting ring.  He was then earning 12 cents per hour mopping prison floors.  Six years later he has almost paid back the full $17.8 million he owed his creditors, including returning $6.5 million of salary to the