What the Word Liberalism Means, If Anything
American politics today seems ever more a contest between two forms of state control – progressive/socialist and nationalist/fascist – with both sides deploying populist states of mass agitation with the hope of deploying power to achieve their ends. Where are the liberals? Not many even claim the label.
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Liberal Capitalism as the Ideology of Freedom and Moderation
Classical liberals and libertarians consider that their defense and insistence upon a principled practice of individual liberty and competitive free markets is no less of a moral necessity and calling than earlier demands for ending infringements on personal and social freedom that were widely taken for granted.
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Cause and Control Is Back in Print
An amazing book appeared before FDR was elected that explained all economic events, using sound economic logic and evidence. The crash, this book said, was the result of monetary mismanagement by the Federal Reserve and distorted price and interest rate signals.
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True or False: Economists Should Advise Despotic States
Economists are often asked to render economic advice to foreign nations. Sometimes these countries are ruled by dictators. That presents a moral quandary.
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Did Bernanke’s Fed Follow Bagehot’s Rules?
Bagehot’s rules are ultimately geared toward assisting illiquid financial organizations but allowing insolvent ones to fail. The Fed went out of its way to support insolvent organizations.
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You Don’t Really Want Smart People Running the World
Most human knowledge is tacit, the product of experience and not capable of being captured in words or numbers, and local, concerned with and relevant to specific local conditions and circumstances.
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Quinn Slobodian and the Academic Attack on Mises and Hayek
Academic works such as Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists demonstrate that the anti-capitalists and anti-liberals are determined to make their case through factual fabrications and scandalous misinterpretations of what classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek really said and advocated.
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Two Myths of the Great Recession
Ten years after the 2008 financial crisis, economists are beginning to assess the lessons learned. Sometimes we learn the right lessons. Sometimes we learn the wrong lessons.
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The Difference Between Micro- and Macro-economics
We must recognize that a whole may exhibit properties that are not present in its parts. But problems come in when the method of study for the economy as a whole looks radically different from that used for its parts.
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Money Is a Social Contract: A Positive View
Economists and philosophers engage in a strange form of positive analysis.
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Money Is a Social Contract: A Normative View
For both social contract theory and monetary theory, theorists are considering something that never happened in the past and that they have no reason to believe will happen in the future. No such considerations are useful.
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Lionel Robbins, Prophet of International Liberalism
“We should not claim for liberalism,” Robbins insisted, “that the world it could produce would be perfect.… But we may claim that, with all its deficiencies, it would still provide a safeguard for happiness and spontaneity more efficient than any other which has yet been suggested.”
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