Given the support unions have provided for so many politicians, their support for PLA "sweetheart deals" for unions on public construction contracts is hardly surprising, particularly since very few Americans know about them. But they are doing no favors for taxpayers or for the vast majority of workers who are not union members.
The custom of tipping is an excellent demonstration of the market's ability to solve real-world problems of dispersed knowledge and transactions costs in order to ensure the maximum satisfaction of consumer preferences. Normally taken for granted, tipping is in fact a beautiful illustration of the power of voluntary, decentralized exchange.
Why shouldn't the worker who is willing to render the best services for the least pay be the one who gets the job? Instinctively, most of us recoil in disgust at the suggestion that wages should reflect nothing more than the cold calculus of supply and demand. Yet few of us realize just how essential this "cold calculus" is for the long-run welfare of laborers themselves.
The significance of Jesús Huerta de Soto's new 681-page book, Dinero, crédito bancario y ciclos económicos (Money, bank credit, and business cycles), is precisely that it is the first Misesian treatise on money and banking to appear since the publication of Mises's original work, Theory of Money and Credit, eighty-eight years ago. De Soto's work is the most comprehensive analysis of fractional-reserve banking and of business cycles in print.
Debt is great on the way up. You buy a house or buy stocks and they rise and your debt stays the same, accruing as it does some interest rate that is well below the rate of your advancing stocks and appreciating home. But when prices fall, debt becomes a very cruel master.
The introduction of the euro consists simply of introducing another "managed" paper currency. Whether it will go up or down against other currencies will continue to depend on how it and the other ones are managed.
Since the government's rules for money creation are not working, it seems that the only plan of action that today's Keynesian economists should accept is for government to make counterfeiting legal. Lest anyone think this is silly, imagine the "stimulus" benefits that counterfeiting would produce.
Watchdog groups are correct to monitor the disbursement of the Red Cross's September 11 donations. And the issue of appropriate uses of charitable funds promoted for a particular purpose must be addressed. But the same issue should be raised about innumerable government initiatives whose claimed goals are also undermined by the same diversion of resources.
Gold is the antidote to inflationary money. Gold, its advocates have said through the centuries, protects an individual against the damage caused by the disease called inflation that is created by central banks. Gregory Bresiger reviews Peter Bernstein's attempt to debunk: The Power of Gold: History of an Obsession.
