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For believers in liberty and sound economics, it has been a series of devastating weeks. The crisis of fiat money, long foretold by the Austrian school, finally came. But there turns out to be no great satisfaction in saying “I told you so.” If it would do any good, it would be worth it. But Treasury officials and central bankers are proceeding as

This whole campaign has been dreadfully boring, with gaffe-avoidance techniques squelching all spontaneity, and it doesn’t help that the ideological parameters of the election have been so narrowly drawn as to make any thinking person want to shut up both the candidates and the media that cover them so lovingly. Still, one interesting point has

[This talk was delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit, November 1, 2008, Auburn, Alabama. An MP3 audio version of this talk is available for download .]   I originally conceived of this talk — a case for abolishing the central bank — as an applied update to my 1995 lecture at the Heritage Foundation on “Why Austrian Economics

The headlines say that a deal to bail out automakers stands little chance of success. One might hope that common sense alone would have killed it (it’s never a good idea to throw good money at failing enterprises), but the Democrats are citing intense Republican opposition. So too for the “stimulus package” that contains a long list of bad ideas,

It is a marvelous thing to see the market work, in good times and bad. Just look at the way that marvelous, unplanned barometer of wise resource use — the price system — has reacted in response to the human reality of economic downturn. As we prepare for the future with the holidays upon us, consumers are wondering whether it is a wise thing to

The downturn is following a path so predictable, day by day, that people who comprehend the business cycle don’t even need to read the news. You can intuit what will happen next because it’s happening like a textbook case — even as it is reported with a continued sense of surprise. Press reporting on the downturn has been like reports from a

“If a dystopian nightmare of the totalitarian state finally arrives in the United States, it will be the result of a compromise” If you write about and follow politics enough, you eventually realized that most evil in this world is brought about by those seeking a lesser of two evils. And those who assist in this very much resent it when you

The mystery of Bernard Madoff will be storied a hundred years from now. As history’s biggest financial criminal, he took a cheap ripoff that you can use at home—the Ponzi scheme—and turned it into a global empire worth some $50 billion. One ingredient was financial intelligence. Madoff had buckets of it. Early in his career, he was the real deal,

[This is the introduction to The Left, the Right, and the State .] In American political culture, and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state’s power should be expanded. The Left has a laundry list and the Right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the

For years, many of us puzzled about how something so stupid and destructive as the New Deal could have happened. The stock market crashed because it was overinflated. That’s nothing new. History is filled with credit bubbles that pop. Resources are reallocated to reflect economic reality and we move on. The New Deal was different. It actually