Austrian economics

Again, the hypnotic clarion call for more centralization is launched. Being as sensitive to these sorts of promotions as a certain kind of princess is to a pea under a stack of mattresses, we notice when rhetoric resembling a promotion is floated. We were startled when we read (we can't remember where) that it was lack of a centralized market that caused the recent trillion-dollar drop in the NYSE's share values last week. But when we read the Reuters article excerpted above there was no doubt

For the country, then, to have developed the pragmatic approach to law and public policy is a tragic contradiction. All of the fundamental ideals and principles that America is known for is rejected by pragmatism and pragmatists. They take them to be myths or, as one major contemporary pragmatist recently emailed me, as pure BS!

The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Mark Thornton. Thornton is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He serves as the Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. He has served as the editor of the Austrian Economics Newsletter and as a member of the graduate faculties of Auburn University and Columbus State University.

Greece has gone off the rails, and there are lots of post-mortems being written – especially in the mainstream press – about what went wrong and what could go right. The idea, just as we expected, seems to be that the EU will use this crisis as way of implementing tighter political controls over what were until recently fairly sovereign countries. This Time Magazine article makes just that point, actually.

We always have to start these articles off with the requisite nod to the fierce Gods of Ancient (and Modern) Days. So let's get it out of the way. Here goes ... Goldman is a horrible, smug, abusive institution with obvious ties to the power elite. It may indeed be the heart of darkness on Wall Street, the instrument through which the elite maneuvers as it plies its mercantalistic trade.

Hardly anyone will dispute that most folks who chime in about ethics consider selfishness wrong. There have been exceptions in history and some of the most prominent ethical philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, can even be said to have been ethical egoists or at least ones who championed the moral virtue of prudence as a vital one for living a good human life. But after some significant changes in how human nature began to be understood, being selfish or self-interested – or even

We think the power elite is struggling. We write about this regularly. The Internet has proved a terrible challenge. And partially as a result, the elite's faux-monetary system is compromised; its promotions, generally, are weakening; and people around the world are waking up. In a recent media interview with Russia Today, the insightful, free-market analyst Gerald Celente said much the same thing. He said a revolution (hopefully a civil one) was brewing, and that these are still, in fact, early

Yesterday, as a kind of aside, we described Merkel as a socialist, and we got some pushback on the topic. We know it's hard to conceive of Merkel as a socialist because the mainstream Anglo-American media describes her as a "conservative." But like all those running the EU, she is indeed a socialist, in our view, someone who believes in the primacy of the state and state power.

Ripples of information and anger spread. Blogs rant about fundamental economic building blocks (see above) and contrarian news aggregators provide information to millions. We wrote an article some time ago that said the incredible bailouts that took place in front of average Western citizens had removed the moral authority of Western governance. The average American or European seeing (and reading about) the "money" doled out to banks and financial institutions to "save the system" was provided

Recently we commented on an insightful article in the UK Telegraph that pointed out that Germany was now most obviously the cynosure of the EU, and that the financial crisis had made that clear. But while acknowledging this was true, we wondered if being the center of attention would make any difference to the average German. We asked then, what we ask now: If Germany is going to be dragged into the middle of multiple, sovereign bankruptcies, will remaining in the EU seem such a good thing?