Ron Paul on Dylan Ratigan

Jim Rogers: Obama Is Ruining America

Endless War is Destroying Our Country.

A History of Hyperinflation

Great lecture on the history of hyperinflation by Timothy Terrell.

Into the Future: Chinese Professor, 2030

Korean Conflict: Let’s Reflect on This

This article from May of this year seems like a good things to reflect on in light of what is going on between North and South Korea.

Is the U.S. Government Planning War to Quell the Tide of Economic Unrest?

Ron Paul on MSNBC, Tea Parties, War, Economics

Why Economics Should Be Important for Christians

by Shawn Ritenour

It is not uncommon for Christians to treat economic science with suspicion, because, it is often assumed, economics deals with the things of this world. It must therefore be tainted by the assumption that consumers are selfish, entrepreneurs are greedy, and the market is a cold mistress to the poor and needy. What the world needs instead, it is thought, is love sweet love, and besides the Kingdom of God is not of this world, so why should we care about production and consumption? This attitude is unfortunate because good economics is not dependent upon any specific assumption about the morality of human motivation to action and, as I point out in my new book, Foundations of Economics: A Christian View, God also cares about the material aspect of our existence.

An obvious point too often forgotten is that God did, after all, create a material world – “all things visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed says. God explicitly tells us that his, largely material, creation was very good. In Proverbs we are told to learn from the ant which provides material provision for itself in the winter by working hard in the summer. In Deuteronomy God related blessings and curses that would be visited upon his people depending upon whether they were obedient or disobedient. When obedient, God would bless them with many children, cattle, and much food. When disobedient, God would curse them with barren wombs, small harvests, and shrinking herds. These blessings and curses, therefore, were largely material in nature. Additionally, Jesus himself came in the flesh. Clearly God is not Platonically anti-material.

This point is also explicit in the first mandate given to man after creation. Even before sin and the fall of man, God told our first parents to “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over… every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). As David Hegeman points out in his primer, Plowing in Hope, this mandate requires filling, working, keeping, and ruling creation.

Hegeman also notes that fulfilling God’s dominion mandate requires wise balance. It is possible that we rashly try to draw too much from creation too quickly, make changes too abruptly, or do so without replenishing the earth. We can, however, err on the other extreme and act as if nature is a museum and we are its curator. We can attempt to keep the earth in its pristine natural state, by prohibiting all development, outlawing all new construction projects, and refusing to allow the erecting of any new factories. Acting in this manner results in our failure to reap the resources necessary for our continued existence and the very cultural development decreed by God

In light of the cultural mandate, therefore, an important question comes to the forefront. How do we wisely develop God’s creation? More specifically, how do we fulfill the cultural mandate to have dominion over creation and fill the earth with people without our starving to death or killing one another in a barbaric struggle for survival? These are not moot questions. Whether they know it or not, these are the questions economists work at answering every day. Different societies choose different paths in answering these questions and reap vastly different results.

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The American Sucker – Wake Up America!

The Non-Mystery of Inflation

by Mark Spangler on Mises Daily

[The Freeman, 1978]

Nowadays people from every walk of life are concerned about inflation.

What actually is inflation? Is it inherent in a free market economy? Who or what is the cause? Unions, government regulations, merchants, federal deficits, or middlemen? Can inflation be stopped, and how?

What to do? Most people are desperately confused and searching for answers. Society is facing nothing short of a crisis. In answer to this grave situation comes Henry Hazlitt’s latest book, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It. As Mr. Hazlitt himself begins the book, “no subject is so much discussed today — or so little understood — as inflation.”

Henry Hazlitt estimates that a dollar of today is worth less than 25 cents of a 1940 dollar, and certainly no one has to be told that a dollar continues to buy less and less. Yet, how many people realize that since 1940 the federal government has increased the money stock by well over a thousand percent? Hazlitt reports that at the end of 1939 the total number of dollars in the economy was 63.3 billion, and at the end of 1977 that figure stood at 806.5 billion. Anyone who is aware of these events should surely sense a logical connection between constantly rising prices and a continuous expansion of the money supply.

Mr. Hazlitt points out that there are two sides to every price.

A price is an exchange ratio between a dollar and a unit of goods. When people have more dollars, they value each dollar less. Goods then rise in price, not because goods are scarcer than before, but because dollars are more abundant, and thus less valued.

He clearly explains that the present predicament of ever-soaring prices results from a deliberate government policy to flood the economy with more and more dollars simply by “printing” them. In fact, the term inflation originally meant increasing (inflating) the money supply. Today the term is commonly used to mean the most evident consequence of creating money, generally rising prices.

So, nothing at all is mysterious about inflation; it is government intervention pure and simple. Why, then, do government leaders continue to inflate and why do the printing presses go undetected by the general public?

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