- Mises.org -
The jurisdiction of economics extends far beyond the study of production and consumption of goods and services. The science of economics consists of the study of human action, interaction, and cooperation. Even if you accept the mainstream division of micro- and macroeconomics, at the most basic levels economics deals with how market agents make decisions and how these decisions affect interactions between individuals. Even the broadest of market trends, usually condemned to the realm of "macroeconomics," boils down to interactions between individual market agents.[1]
How individuals interact in tandem, forming the economic system as studied in modern macroeconomics, is simply fascinating. Even the most complex economies, such as today's global market, are made up of individual human actors, each seemingly unaware of the others' intentions and goals. Economics is the science that studies these individual agents of the market and how they coordinate through the price mechanism to create, not just what the mainstream considers "the market," but society as a whole, all without the necessity of a central planner or authority. The fact that human civilization is the product of billions of individuals, each acting to accomplish certain self-serving ends, is truly mind blowing.
What economists call "political economy," or modern economics, did not come into being until the mid-18th century.[2] Since then the study of economics has not been one of linear progress; neither has it been free of controversy. Even before the birth of political economy, the study of economics was done by competing schools of thought; for example, the French mercantilists and the French liberals.[3] Following the Smithian movement and despite the development of Marxism in the mid-19th century, economics was largely unified by the marginal revolution.[4] However, the marginal revolution was followed by the birth of several distinct schools of economic thought. Some of the most well-known include the Neoclassical, Austrian, and Keynesian Schools, which interestingly all enjoy the same foundations in the marginal revolution.[5]
Read it all, and bookmark mises.org and lewrockwell.com and visit them regularly. Learn enough about it and you'll soon be predicting the future.
ludwig von mises was funded by the rockefeller foundation. you're stuck in yet another false paradigm.
ReplyDeletehttp://libertyrevival.wordpress.com/documents/economic-conspiracy/
you don't even consider the merits of public debt-free fiat and how coming off the federal reserve and fractional reserve lending would create enough revenue for the government to pay off the national debt and end income taxation, whereas gold fiat would massively destroy wealth. you only consider debt fiat and it's cousin, gold fiat. you don't understand how taxation on land and natural resources are good and how the founding fathers supported it, and how taxation on labor and interest (labor-based capital and savings) is bad.
see what the founding fathers really thought and don't take the word of neo-classical economists, the post-1913 frauds of von mises, marx, and keynes.
I don't really think it's your place to judge my views on economics based on this one article, particularly since your economic conspiracy essay is full of fallacies, contradictions and misrepresentations. "Gold fiat" is a contradiction in terms, since fiat is money that isn't backed by anything but government trust. If I can take a bank note to a bank and demand its equivalent in gold, that can't, by definition, be fiat money.
ReplyDeleteFurther, Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute and Austrians push gold, true, because gold has always held its value. However they would support whatever currency the free market determines is best, be it gold, sea shells or rabbit droppings, or any combination of anything people decide in their wisdom they wish to trade with.
There is no such thing as wealth destruction if that wealth was based almost totally on a debt and credit. So to say that switching to a gold standard after eradicating the Fed/Central Banking and fractional reserve lending would destroy wealth is incorrect. There would be a correction, which is always painful, but they don't call it a correction for nothing. The wealth was fake, our debt is fraudulent, and it should be repudiated. Why would we print up (worthless) debt-free fiat currency to pay back the debt accrued through a criminal, fraudulent and unconstitutional monetary system? I didn't vote for any of this. Regardless, any fiat system, debt-based or not, has always inflated itself into worthlessness. Let the free market decide what the currency is. The State is a gang of thieves, writ large. Anyone with a monopoly on the distribution and value of currency will be corrupted by it, and the people will be robbed of their actual wealth and productivity.