Is the Economy a Perpetual Motion Machine? - William L. Anderson - Mises Institute

Is the Economy a Perpetual Motion Machine? - William L. Anderson - Mises Institute: "Instead, the act of saving provides a means for producers to obtain capital, and capital goods are then used to produce more goods using fewer resources so that the newly freed resources can be used to produce those things that were unavailable before.

This is a viewpoint that recognizes the law of scarcity. It also recognizes that more consumption is made possible only by more production, but production that is done in line with both the spending and saving patterns of individuals in the economy. If lines of capital are created that are not compatible with saving and spending patterns set by consumers, then the capital is malinvested.

Malinvestment does not occur by accident. It happens because the government, through monetary authorities, has suppressed real interest rates and has touched off a credit-inspired boom that cannot be sustained."

Campaign For Liberty — Constitutional Tender Act testimony before the banking subcommittees of the Georgia House

Campaign For Liberty — Constitutional Tender Act testimony before the banking subcommittees of the Georgia House: "The Constitution of the United States recognizes sovereignty of the states in article ten of the Bill of Rights. However, the states are forbidden to make 'any Thing but gold or silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts' in Article I section 10. The central government is given no power to make a tender at all. Furthermore, on August 16, 1787 a motion to strike out the power of Congress to 'emit bills on the credit of the U. States' carried nine to two. All the discussion regarded 'bills of credit' to be 'paper money.' Article I section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress the power to 'Coin money' which obviously concerns coins and not paper. Indeed, why would the founders grant the Congress the power to create money that the States would be forbidden from making a tender? Despite Washington DC's ignorance and hostility to the Constitution of the United States, we in Georgia have an obligation to do our best to follow it. The Constitutional Tender Act is a good start at compliance with the Constitution."

Obama Denies Bailout Funds for U.S. Automakers, Sets Restructure Deadline - First 100 Days of Presidency - Politics FOXNews.com

Obama Denies Bailout Funds for U.S. Automakers, Sets Restructure Deadline - First 100 Days of Presidency - Politics FOXNews.com: "The Obama administration, however, has decided not to require the automakers to immediately repay government loan money they previously received, since that would force both companies into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

A senior administration official told FOX�News, 'calling in the loans would not be a productive exercise for the American taxpayer since the companies don't have the money [to repay the loans] and it would simply put the companies into uncontrolled Chapter 11.'"

And why do they think the companies will be able to repay the loans later?

How FDR Promoted Price-Gouging

How FDR Promoted Price-Gouging: "First came FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act, considered the flagship of the New Deal. FDR signed that in June 1933, climaxing his heroic Hundred Days of legislative mania. Back then, the economic situation was considered so urgent that members of Congress didn't have time to seriously debate FDR's proposals.

The members probably didn't have time to read the bills, either, before the voting began. Possibly, the Hundred Days began the American tradition of having members of Congress vote on bills they haven't read. In any case, The National Industrial Recovery Act authorized the president to establish cartels via executive orders. He established some 500 cartels, and one of the things they did was fix prices above market levels."

"The bottom line was that the law made it illegal for big stores to cut prices. If private stores had conspired among themselves to maintain high prices, they would have invited prosecution under the antitrust laws."

"The CAB made clear its intent to suppress competition when it declared, "In the absence of particular circumstances presenting an affirmative reason for a new carrier, there appears to be no inherent desirability of increasing the present number of carriers merely for the purpose of numerically enlarging the industry." During the next 40 years, until airlines were deregulated in 1978, the CAB didn't issue a license for a single new interstate airline."

"The most famous private "monopoly," John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, lost market share despite having cut the price of its principal product 90 percent, because it wasn't backed by the force of government. Perhaps the most intriguing question is why "progressives" continue to view FDR as savior, giving him a free pass as a price-gouger."

US Cries Chinese Wolf

US Cries Chinese Wolf: "Indeed, in the Pentagon press briefing introducing the report a senior defense official said, 'China appears to be pursuing a set of enduring strategic priorities which we identify in this report as, first, perpetuating the role of the Chinese Communist Party, continuing economic development, ensuring domestic stability, protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity and obtaining great-power status.'

With the exception of protecting the Chinese Communist Party there are the same goals the United States lists in its own annual strategy documents."

The Works of Leonard E. Read - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Institute

The Works of Leonard E. Read - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Institute: "Pick up any book or publication from FEE before the 1990s. You will see a remarkable and visionary sentence on the copyright page:

Permission to reprint granted without special request.
This one sentence is what made it happen. Any newspaper could print a column. Any publisher could include an essay. Indeed, he invited any publisher to take any FEE book and publish it and sell it, owing no royalties and asking no permissions.

'He was an evangelist spreading the news. He wanted to be pirated so that he could see that he was making a difference.'

The publisher was not even asked to acknowledge its source! So, in this sense, he was even more radical than the�Creative Commons attribution license. A FEE book was copyrighted solely so that someone else couldn't copyright it, and then maximum permissions were granted. In effect, Read was putting all of the scholarship of FEE in the public domain as soon as it was published.

This saved on the grueling bureaucratic struggle involved in granting permissions and keeping up with the permissions granted. Asking no fees or royalties meant saving on accounting bureaucracy as well."

The Flat Tax Is Not Flat and the FairTax Is Not Fair - Laurence M. Vance - Mises Institute

The Flat Tax Is Not Flat and the FairTax Is Not Fair - Laurence M. Vance - Mises Institute: "But not only is the Flat Tax not flat and the FairTax not fair, the Flat Tax is not fair and the FairTax is not flat. Let me repeat that: not only is the Flat Tax not flat and the FairTax not fair, the Flat Tax is not fair and the FairTax is not flat.

According to Hall and Rabushka, the flat-tax system they propose is both 'fair and progressive — the poor pay no tax, and the amount that a family pays rises with income.'"

Would Cleansing Banks' Balance Sheets Kick-start the US Economy? - Frank Shostak - Mises Institute

Would Cleansing Banks' Balance Sheets Kick-start the US Economy? - Frank Shostak - Mises Institute: "As a result of the unbacked credit, an additional demand for various goods emerges. This leads to an attempt at expanding the infrastructure of the economy. This attempt is bound to fail since the flow of real savings is not large enough to support the expansion of the infrastructure."

There Will Be (Hyper)Inflation - Thorsten Polleit - Mises Institute

There Will Be (Hyper)Inflation - Thorsten Polleit - Mises Institute: "as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke made unmistakably clear in a notorious speech in 2002:

[T]he U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.[3]"

There Will Be (Hyper)Inflation - Thorsten Polleit - Mises Institute

There Will Be (Hyper)Inflation - Thorsten Polleit - Mises Institute: "The US Federal Reserve, for instance, increased the stock of the monetary base — which includes banks' demand deposits held with the Fed, plus coins and notes in circulation — from $870.9 billion in August 2008 to $1735.3 billion in January 2009."

Old NATO Turns 60

Old NATO Turns 60: "The point is not that the U.S. was always right, but that the U.S. got little out of the trans–Atlantic alliance, whose members went their own way whenever they felt like it. During the Cold War American policymakers might tell themselves that they had no choice but to defend the feckless Europeans. However, this argument for the alliance disappeared along with the Cold War."

The Trouble with Warren Buffett - Doug French - Mises Institute

The Trouble with Warren Buffett - Doug French - Mises Institute: "a viewer asked Buffett if he believed what his father Congressman Howard Buffett believed, which was this: 'So far as I can discover, paper money systems [like John Law's] have always wound up with collapse and economic chaos.'

'Sounds like my dad, yeah,' Buffett replied, 'I heard that every night at the dinner table for a long time.' The Oracle admits that the printing of paper money is inflationary, but being a consistent proponent of expanding government, he constantly dismisses gold and proposals to return America to a gold standard.

His father Howard understood the evils of unchecked government money printing.

"The paper money disease has been a pleasant habit thus far and will not be dropped voluntarily any more than a dope user will without a struggle give up narcotics," Congressman Buffett wrote. "But in each case the end of the road is not a desirable prospect."