It’s unlikely that we’ll have more manufacturing jobs. The story of economic progress is one of doing more with less. This has been especially true in U.S. manufacturing, where the value of manufacturing, in inflation-adjusted terms, reached an all-time high before our current recession. And while that has happened, we’ve had fewer and fewer people becoming more and more productive. Moreover, every major manufacturing economy, including China’s, has lost manufacturing jobs.

The US policy of extend and pretend, and recapitalizing the banks by printing so much money that eventually the losses will disappear due to inflation, has pushed up the price of gold and led to booms in Internet 2.0 stocks (and Silicon Valley real estate once again), but just as Austrian economists predicted, it has been a disaster for the real people who, as George Bailey reminded Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life, do most of the living and dying (and voting) around here. Unfortunately they are last in line to receive the benefits of newly-created money.

in theory, fiscal stimulus can cushion the downturn and hasten real recovery by preventing a spiral into a non-equilibrating economic state. However, in practice, stimulus has been used as an excuse to maintain the status quo, prop up zombie companies and forestall the inevitable. This only lengthens the downturn, misallocating even more resources to less efficient uses

This is why ending inflationary monetary policies should not just be the preserve of the “cranks” and “gold bugs” of mainstream economic folklore. Inflation disproportionately harms the poorest in society. Sound money is, to borrow a phrase, an issue of ‘social’ justice.

In 89 clinics that accepted both kinds of patients, the waiting time for callers who said they had Medicaid was an average of 22 days longer.

One often hears frustrated citizens asking why the bank won’t write down the principal on underwater mortgages, when after all it’s better for the bank to get something than to foreclose. This is why:

In other words, at some point the regulatory state cannot be made to work for the same reasons socialism cannot be made to work: the planners/regulators simply cannot assimilate enough information and make correct resource allocation decisions.

The utter brilliance of the Austrian framework is that, given this logical, deductive, causal connection, all Austrian economic theory is in this sense unified. To Austrians, economics is not a medley of generalizations based on empirical observation; economics is an integrated theoretical structure.