Category Archives: Economics

Environmental Kuznets curve

Definition: The environmental Kuznets curve suggests that economic development initially leads to a deterioration in the environment, but after a certain level of economic growth, a society begins to improve its relationship with the environment and levels of environmental degradation reduces.

From a very simplistic viewpoint, it can suggest that economic growth is good for the environment.

However, critics argue there is no guarantee that economic growth will lead to an improved environment – in fact, the opposite is often the case. At the least, it requires a very targeted policy and attitudes to make sure that economic growth is compatible with an improving environment.

Continue reading here.

The big story of 2024 that nobody is talking about

Article by Kit Knightly.

Excerpt:

Sound and fury and all that signifies. But were they the most important?

No, the important story of 2024 was The Great Reset.

Remember that? It was this pan-global supranational plan to tear down and then rebuild society in a “sustainable”, “inclusive”, “fair” and “secure” way that would – totally accidentally – eradicate civil liberties and individual freedom for every single person on the planet.

It was all the rage a few years ago, you might remember. But when it didn’t go over too well with a lot of people, the powers that be dropped the subject and there’s been very little talk about it since 2022.

Does that mean it’s gone away?

We need to have “object permanence” in politics as in all things. Something doesn’t cease to exist just because you can’t see it anymore. The world doesn’t vanish when you close your eyes.

The Great Reset is still the plan.

Collapse of the $5 Trillion Green Energy Scam

Interview with Doug Casey in “International Man” (via lewrockwell.com).

Excerpt:

Doug Casey: We’ve had two tremendous mass hysterias in the last decade.

One revolves around health, with a novel disease and the creation of a vaccine said to fight it. Second is the climate hysteria, which promises to be even more disruptive.

Generations of students have been indoctrinated to believe that Mother Earth is being ravaged by its evil human population. In reality, Earth is going to be just fine. The real damage is being done by the kind of people who want to control other people. The answer to what should be done is: Nothing. The busybodies should mind their own business.

The Greens, however, love to get involved in big causes where they have lots of slogans and memes but very little scientific or technical knowledge. However, “getting involved” generates emotions which give meaning to their generally unproductive lives. Lacking traditional religion, they crave something bigger than themselves. It wasn’t so long ago that saving the whales was the cause du jour. Even though, with some minor exceptions, whales haven’t been hunted for over a century. Or saving the polar bears, even their population has been increasing for decades. I wonder what ever happened to the snail darter?

If it’s not one thing, it’s something else. It’s always something to get the population into a state of fear and hysteria. The elite who control society use them to keep the plebs in line.

How 1936 Consolidated the Progressives’ Triumph in 1913

Article by Gary North.

Excerpts:

Until the myth of Keynes and the myth of Franklin Roosevelt, which are closely entwined, are refuted in a series of comprehensive, scholarly materials, and then translated into materials accessible to the general public, and rhetorically effective among bright high school students who are in homeschool programs, we will remain on the receiving end of the Establishment’s overwhelming control of the media and academia. The World Wide Web offers a way to get around both of these Establishment operations, but in these two fundamental areas of American history — the New Deal and Keynes’s original introduction to Keynesianism — we have not yet begun to fight.

The intellectual battles over the New Deal and Keynes were part of a continuing war. Conservatives and libertarians lost both in 1936, but not because of their lack of theory. Mises had provided the basis of the answer in 1912 with The Theory of Money and Credit. Hayek also had the foundation: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933). But neither of them sat down in 1936 to write definitive answers to Keynes. Neither of them ever did. Mises wrote a major book in 1957: Theory and History. By then, Keynes was triumphant in Western academia. Hayek’s final book was in 1988: The Fatal Conceit.

You have to fight when the battle comes to you. It is not good enough to be well armed. You have to stand your ground and fight.

John Maynard Keynes

Writes Robert Katz:

John Maynard Keynes, 1883 – 1946, was an infamous British mountebank and soothsayer who overpoweringly advanced the idea that an effective way for the State to defray the extravagant expenses met on route to its worldwide barbarous pillaging would be for it to engage in mass counterfeiting. He based his prognostication of the scheme’s efficacy on the premises that the multitude was either ignorant enough to believe that the debasement of their money was beneficial or wicked enough to energetically participate as the State’s privileged partner in the sham of taking in sound money and passing out fake. He was alarmingly accurate on both behavioral suppositions. Some of the biggest and most dishonorable swindlers of this morally offensive confidence game are Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell.

The Birth of “Irrational Exuberance”

It’s still with us. Article by George F. Smith.

Excerpt:

John Law, the early eighteenth-century Scottish gambler and financier, thought the best way to revive an ailing economy was to remove the “great scarcity of money,” as he wrote in a 1705 monetary tract. A decade after its publication he took his ideas to the Continent and sold them to Philippe d’Orleans, the regent in charge of France’s finances, who needed a scheme more sophisticated than his failed program of coin clipping and confiscation to save the nation from bankruptcy.

In 1716 Philippe set Law up as head of the Banque Générale, the country’s central bank, giving it and him monopoly control of the note issue. Having won the nation’s trust with declarations of allegiance to sound money principles – he had promised his banknotes would be “payable on sight” in unadulterated gold coin – Law proceeded to apply another element of his theory. Because a scarcity of money, he believed, was the root of France’s economic problems, and since banknotes backed purely by precious metals would be in short supply, he began issuing notes “backed” by the nation’s vast landholdings. Exactly how one would redeem banknotes for acreage he neglected to explain.

Is John Law regarded as a charlatan today? Not whatsoever. The most influential economists of modern times regard Law with sympathy and respect. One eminent economic historian places Law in the “front ranks of monetary theorists of all time.” Others view him jealously for being the first economist to run an entire country, even if it meant running it into the ground.

Saint-Simon concluded,

[T]he chimera of the Mississippi, with its shares, its special jargon, its science (a continual juggle for drawing money from one person to give it to another), was to almost guarantee that these shares should at last end in smoke (since we had neither mines, nor quarries of the philosopher’s stone), and that the few would be enriched at the expense of the many, as in fact happened.

The allure of easy money drives irrational behavior, then and now.  End the Fed.

Net Zero means zero growth

Interview (podcast) on spiked-online.com with Jon Moynihan. Interviewer is Brendan O’Neill.

Introduction of the written excerpts:

Britain, the nation that birthed the Industrial Revolution, is now a world leader in deindustrialisation. The power stations, oil refineries and steelworks that helped make the UK wealthy are now closing down and moving abroad. High energy prices are crippling industry and hurting households. Yet politicians are doubling down on precisely the policies that have brought us here. Reducing carbon emissions, they say, must be the nation’s priority. Apparently, we need to embrace a Net Zero future, no matter what it costs our economy.

Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve

Video by the Mises Institute.

The Fed has been the source of booms, busts, and the ongoing impoverishment of Americans since the Fed’s founding.

This is why a new, critical look at the Federal Reserve is needed, and why the Mises Institute is now happy to bring you this new documentary on the Fed.

Playing with Fire provides a look at how the Fed uses its expanding power to damage our economy, increase inequality, and to impoverish ordinary Americans. The film also looks at how much the Fed has expanded its own power since the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Featuring interviews with Ron Paul, Tom DiLorenzo, Joseph Salerno, Mark Thornton, Jim Grant, Alex Pollock, and Jonathan Newman, Playing with Fire explains what the Fed is, where it came from, and why it is so dangerous. Perhaps most importantly of all, Playing with Fire shows why we need to end the Fed altogether.