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A Malignant, Dysfunctional Monetary System

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When a monetary policy measures its success by how much economic devastation it is producing, that’s a good sign that that is one malignant, dysfunctional system.  But that is precisely what the Federal Reserve is doing with its policy of rapid, dramatic interest-rate increases. It measures the success of its program by how many people and businesses, especially in the housing industry, it is driving into bankruptcy. The more, the better. So long as people and businesses are doing well, the Fed will continue raising interest rates until it can succeed in putting more people and more businesses down. The quirk in the Fed’s policy is that this time around, the Fed’s “tightening" policy is adversely impacting the banking industry. The Federal Reserve consists of bankers. It’s one thing when building contractors go out of business or people default on their home mortgages. No big deal as far as the Fed is concerned. That’s a sign that ...

Those Scary and Dangerous Russkies

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It was always inevitable that the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s “war on terrorism” would begin fizzling out, especially as the number of foreigners they were killing significantly diminished. When U.S. forces got booted out of Afghanistan and began killing significantly less people in Iraq, the rage that motivates terrorists to strike began going down.  That’s undoubtedly why the Pentagon hedged its bets and began expanding NATO eastward after the ostensible end of the Cold War, moving inexorably closer to Russia’s border. Pentagon officials figured that if their “war on terrorism” began fizzling out, they could still gin up their old Cold War racket, one that had proven to be highly lucrative for the national-security establishment and its army of voracious “defense” contractors who depend on feeding at the public trough. With its interventionist antics, the Pentagon succeeded in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine, which has turned into an enormous bonanza for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the

Philip Wicksteed on the Common Sense of Choice and the Market Process

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The British economist Philip H. Wicksteed began his most important work, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), with a motto taken from the famous German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): “We all live it, but few of us know what we are living.” Contrary to the classical economists, who had argued that the market value of things was ultimately based on the objective quantity of human labor that had gone into their manufacture, Wicksteed argued that the value of things begins in the human mind, and from there brings about the prices of things bought and sold in the marketplace. At the same time, Wicksteed went on to explain in his Common Sense that the logic by which we value things is not something that needs to be learned and consciously adopted but rather is the way our own minds just work in a world in which scarcity exists. That is, a world in which the means that ...