Booms and Busts

Recorded at Mises University 2010. Includes an introduction by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 

Combine loose money with flawed financial theories and the creation of byzantine financial products, and ultimately modern financial alchemy "has a distinctly statist and paternalist tone, and one which, taken to its logical conclusion, implies the establishment of nothing less than a world government with the power to redistribute most of our income at will," explain the authors.

Tom Kowitz and Michele Gaudin of WGSO 990AM, New Orleans, interview Professor Walter Block, 17 July 2010.

In a free market, an unemployed man has always chosen unemployment over working in a place, at a time, in a way, or for a wage that he dislikes, wr

"The necessary result of the adoption of this empiricist epistemological and methodological model was that social scientists would always be behind the curve of any emerging social phenomenon."

The job applications pour in by the buckets, all padded with degrees and made to look as impressive as possible. It’s all just paper.

Instead of addressing the Depression though the proven expedient of private-bank-issued scrip, the Roosevelt administration's plan involved suspension of the gold standard, followed by devaluation and the abrogation of the gold clause, cartelization of the banks of the country, the National Recovery Act, the Wagner Act, the alphabet-soup agencies, Social Security, and the beginning of an ever-expanding government.

Keynesianism ignores the fact that government spending must come either from tax dollars or from the printing presses, both of which harm the common man. Instead, Keynesianism promises that we can all pick one another's pockets — and all get rich doing it!

In the real world, of course, the real danger of credit expansion and the boom-bust cycle comes from fiat money and fractional-reserve banking.

The beginning of a new credit expansion runs across remainders of preceding malinvestment and malemployment, not yet obliterated in the course of t