A cry heard often today — both on the west and east sides of the Atlantic — is that inflation levels are dangerously low. While most central banks target a price inflation level of around 2–3 percent, general price indexes of most Western countries are falling below the lower bound of that target
[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)] Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) began as a devoted Smithian but more consistently attached to laissez-faire. During his relatively brief span of interest in economics, he became more and more statist. His intensified statism was merely one aspect of his major — and highly unfortunate — contribution to economics: his consistent philosophical utilitarianism.
[ The State (1908)] The psychological explanation of barter has brought forth the theory of the marginal utility, its greatest merit.
In his defense of the constitutionality of Lochner v. New York against the critics in the last issue of Claremont Review of Books , professor Richard Epstein invokes the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment.
[ Man, Economy, and State (1962)] 1.
“The United States has a long and healthy history of entrepreneurial disobedience.” From the original conception of the United States Postal Service in the 1700s to the technologically advanced market of today, the words that enumerated to Congress the power to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” have never been more than a waste of ink.
[ Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers • By Jared Dillian • Simon and Schuster, 2011 • 368 pages] Wall Street traders, like high-stakes poker players, are a different breed. The constant pressure, the appetite for risk, the ability to think and react in split seconds, all the while calculating odds in their heads that most can’t do with an HP12C.
[ The Causes of the Economic Crisis and Other Essays Before and After the Great Depression ] The Role of Interest Rates In our economic system, times of good business commonly alternate more or less regularly with times of bad business. Decline follows economic upswing, upswing follows decline, and so on.
What was earth-shattering about the advent of economics, according to Ludwig von Mises, was its unprecedented discovery of regularity in the social realm. Just as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had discovered that there were immutable laws that regulate the movements of physical bodies, the early economists discovered that there were immutable laws that regulate market phenomena. [1] Key among these discoveries was the realization that prices are not arbitrary numbers that people simply tack on to commodities.
[ The Mainspring of Human Progress (1943)] The pagan has a fatalistic outlook on life. He believes that the individual is helpless; that he is wholly at the mercy of relentless forces outside of himself; that there’s nothing he can do to improve his lot. The vast majority of people have always been pagans
