Good short essay. Your "grift" point is interesting. It goes almost unnoticed in economics, unfortunately. An exception is a 1990s paper on bankruptcy for profit by Akerlof and Romer, in which they show that creating what will become failed real estate ventures and failed financial assets can quite lucrative. Prerequisites are a central bank willing to keep interest rates artificially low and government willing to backstop the scam assets. There's plenty of evidence that the 2008 financial crisis was of this nature.
Interestingly, Mises himself was aware of this. Just before WWI he was warning the Austro-Hungarian central bankers about their easy money policy, and didn't understand why the seemed not to get it. At some point Bohm-Bawerk took him aside and said "they do indeed understand you and know you are right. But they are using this policy to finance their own grift." Mises preferred to emphasize the positive economic argument in his economics writing such as Human Action, rather than the ulterior motives and corruption of bad actors (although he addressed these in some of his writing for popular audiences).
End the "dual mandate", and the Fed will be better at fighting inflation.
The Fed actually causes inflation.
their only real mandate is protecting their own. End the Fed.
Good short essay. Your "grift" point is interesting. It goes almost unnoticed in economics, unfortunately. An exception is a 1990s paper on bankruptcy for profit by Akerlof and Romer, in which they show that creating what will become failed real estate ventures and failed financial assets can quite lucrative. Prerequisites are a central bank willing to keep interest rates artificially low and government willing to backstop the scam assets. There's plenty of evidence that the 2008 financial crisis was of this nature.
Interestingly, Mises himself was aware of this. Just before WWI he was warning the Austro-Hungarian central bankers about their easy money policy, and didn't understand why the seemed not to get it. At some point Bohm-Bawerk took him aside and said "they do indeed understand you and know you are right. But they are using this policy to finance their own grift." Mises preferred to emphasize the positive economic argument in his economics writing such as Human Action, rather than the ulterior motives and corruption of bad actors (although he addressed these in some of his writing for popular audiences).
Well said. Thanks, Josiah!