The Federal debt has now crossed the $19 trillion mark. When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, Uncle Sam’s debt stood at $5 trillion. When President Bush left office in January of 2009, it had increased to $10 trillion. Now into seven years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the Federal debt has almost doubled again.
Carl Menger is a towering figure, not only for the development of his variation on the “marginalist” theme, but for originating a still unique and distinct and highly relevant approach to economic and social analysis that still rightly bears the name, the “Austrian School.”
Keynes helped undermine what had been three of the essential institutional ingredients of a free-market economy: the gold standard, balanced government budgets, and open competitive markets. In their place Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more political intervention throughout the market.
American “progressives” portray themselves as “forward-looking,” advocates of a higher and better freedom than the traditional American conception of liberty as freedom from government coercion and control. In fact, they are the intellectual great-grandchildren of the “reactionary” nineteenth century Imperial German “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck.
What is the role of government in society?
Böhm-Bawerk is famous as one of the leading critics of Marxism and socialism in the years before the First World War. He is equally renowned as one of the developers of “marginal utility” theory as the basis of showing the logic and workings of the competitive market price system, and as the early formulator of the “Austrian” theory of capital and interest.
The Lithuanians had been at the vanguard in the movement for freedom in the Soviet Union. They had elected a non-communist government in free elections, had declared their national independence from Soviet rule, and strongly affirmed their intention of reversing a half-century of socialist central planning through privatization and free market reforms.
Schumpeter is famous as a leading 20th century formulator of the notion of the entrepreneur as dynamic innovator of change, and also as a master of the history of economic ideas.
Under a political regime of liberty, each individual gives purpose and moral compass to his own life.
The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system in many parts of the world over the last one hundred years has been one of the cruelest and most brutal episodes in human history.
If all of that dispersed and decentralized knowledge that exists in the individual minds of all the members of society is to be effectively used and brought to bear for mutual improvement of the human condition, each of us must be left free to use that knowledge as we, respectively, think best and most advantageous.
What would the State of the Union address be like if Obama had such an epiphany for defending individual liberty rather than more unrestricted government license over our lives?
The more complex the social and economic system the less any single or handful of human minds could comprehend, master or manipulate the relationships for better outcomes than when the market was left free.
The “knowledge of the world” is dispersed and divided up in the minds of all the members of society, with each knowing and understanding only a small part relative to all the knowledge that exists in everybody’s minds, combined.
A central tool for governments to maintain their authority in society and their control over people’s lives is the ability to make the citizenry accept and use their monopoly medium of exchange.
By taxing income, businesses, and estates, government siphons off part of the ability for people to do the work, savings, and investment out of which wealth, opportunities, and prosperity come.
On the surface, labor unions make their appeal to society with rhetoric of claiming to want to better the conditions of all workers seeking gainful and income-enhancing employment. What is not as clearly seen are the indirect and usually unintended effects from compulsory unionism that end up keeping far too many in poverty and less remunerative jobs that the supporters of labor unions say they wish to help.
Before the arrival of modern welfare state, voluntary, private-sector institutions had evolved to serve as the market providers for many of those “social services” now viewed as the near-exclusive prerogative of the government. Unfortunately, after nearly a century of increasing political and cultural collectivism, the historical memory of the pre-welfare state era has all but been lost.
Social Security is financial unsustainable and morally bankrupt.
The real long-run goal of monetary reform should be the denationalization of money. That is, the separation of money from the state by ending of central banking, altogether. In its place would emerge private, competitive free banking – a truly market-based money and banking system.
The “freedom” about which Bernie Sanders speaks, and before him Franklin Roosevelt, in fact, involves a loss of liberty into an even greater degree of political paternalism.
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