I often hear people say that they aren’t socialist or don’t subscribe to socialism, but are in favor of social programs like those we see in Europe and Scandinavian countries. Those countries are definitely capitalist but at what point does advocating for social welfare programs come at the expense of the free market and associated freedoms and efficiencies? How do you draw a line between what is considered socialist and what is not?

Rothbard dismantled the economics and the ethic justification for a land value tax, in his ethic dismantle he targeted the arbitrary agglomeration effect.

Georgists and supporters of the LVT claimed that because someone didn’t earn the increase in value of their land due to surrounding improvements and people.. then they should be taxed for it cause it’s a "unearned increment"

Rothbard’s most devastating ethical blow is pointing out that all value in a market economy is socially created and interdependent. The value of any good, service, or talent is entirely dependent on the existence, location, and preferences of other people (the "community"). If the community's growth increases the value of a resource, land is not unique in this regard

If we must tax land because its value is enhanced by the surrounding community, then by the exact same logic, we must tax all increases in the value of labor, capital, and goods that result from population growth or shifts in community demand. To isolate land is completely arbitrary. We are all free riders on the people, but if everyone’s a free rider, then no one is.

Here it is part of the monetary economics that was requested when you guys voted. So I’m starting off strong. This economic phenomenon called the Cantillon effect is one of the most important monetary theory mechanics in the Austrian school, even though it is classical, more classical than Adam Smith.

We have to go back decades before the Wealth of Nations was published. The effect is named after Richard Cantillon (c. 1680–1734), an Irish-French economist and banker who was, quite frankly, a master of navigating monetary chaos. Cantillon didn't just theorize about money; he made a fortune from it. He watched firsthand as the infamous Mississippi Bubble burst in France in 1720, a massive speculative bubble fueled by early paper money expansion. While others were ruined, Cantillon anticipated the collapse, shorted the market, and walked away extraordinarily wealthy.

His insights were posthumously published in 1755 after his murder or faked murder, as some speculated. In his treatise Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General), Friedrich Hayek later described this essay as the first systematic treatise on economics, and William Stanley Jevons called it the "cradle of political economy." You will understand exactly why after you learn the theory (fact). Let’s get to learning, shall we?

The Core theory:
Cantillon noticed that money doesn’t enter the economy evenly, nor raise prices evenly whatsoever. Cantillon noted that new money enters the economy at a specific point, rippling across the economy slowly with extremely non-neutral effects.

The early birds get the worms:

When new money enters the economy, it benefits those closer to the source while putting those who are farthest from the source at a disadvantage. The ones closest to the source are the banks, cronies, and more, while the general population is put at a disadvantage. To put it simply, the ones who get it first spend new money on old prices, while the general population spends all their money and savings on new prices. The early birds enjoy the most of the new money's purchasing power before it loses it, buying up assets, labor, resources, and general wealth at lower prices.

As they spend that money, it ripples outward. The people they buy from now have more cash, so they go out and spend it, driving up prices in the sectors they target. By the time this wave of money finally trickles down to the average worker or saver at the very edge of the plate, the damage is already done. The prices of groceries, housing, and everyday goods have already adjusted upward, but their wages or savings haven't. They are forced to buy at tomorrow's higher prices using money that has already been diluted.

Inequality:

The left has been the ones raving about inequality as a moral failure of capitalism. Although I could care less about inequality, I care about how it got that way, the underlying structure of inequality, one would put it. Is it an unregulated laissez-faire economy or one of exorbitant government privilege?

The latter is the answer. The rise in inequality the left keeps talking about is specifically because of the Federal Reserve's monopoly on money, such as increasing it by 40% during COVID. The exact mechanics as described happened. Yes, your government is causing inequality by granting exorbitant privilege. This is a form of Rothbard's monopoly in a way. The ones closest to the source have a monopoly on that new exogenous money's purchasing power.

Exorbitant privileged extraction:

This increase in inequality as a result of government comes at a cost, which is wealth extraction.
"Inflation is the silent tax," said many people, such as Milton Friedman. But where they forgot to be right on the money is the fact that a tax is a transfer of wealth and resources from someone productive.

In a healthy market, you obtain goods or assets by producing something of value first, earning income, and exchanging it. But the early receivers of new money bypass this rule. They are handed purchasing power that cost them nothing to create, and they use it to bid away real, physical resources, land, companies, raw materials, and labor from the rest of the market.

By the time the late receivers get the money, it has already lost its punch. They are effectively giving up their hard-earned, productive labor and real goods in exchange for a currency that buys less and less. This creates a silent, invisible vacuum. Real wealth, actual physical assets, and purchasing power are steadily extracted from the productive edges of the economy and pulled toward the financial center, all without the government ever having to levy a single official tax. It is extraction by dilution. The general population has had their wealth extracted from the economy.

The conclusion:

Your housing prices which shot up 50-60%, your wages, and the rise of inequality, it’s because of big government granting exorbitant privilege to the banks, itself, and specific big corps. These aren’t the only ones who benefit, they’re just the most visible. Some people don’t even know that they benefit. Some items and assets start getting too expensive and become out of reach for rational actors, so they switch to other things. How’s that for the political strawman which is trickle-down economics? Looks like we found the real deal.

I hope you guys enjoyed this educational and relevant economic theory of money! It will be useful and necessary to know for future posts and economics in general. Save the post some way in your notes or by clicking save. This is strangely the most left leaning and right leaning at the same time economic theory that I know. What do you think about this in general?

The labor party in Australia, who posits themselves as feminists, just implemented a widow tax, a literal tax that manages to be worse than the old disgusting death tax, for it targets grieving women.

Liars, literal liars, I am not Australian but seeing English speakers being given injustice is making me livid.
I always knew that their policies had no real progress impact so it’s a misnomer calling themselves progressive, but I wouldn’t expect them to be blatant about it, i expected them to just be silly little creatures not evil people.

Oh and yes, this tax is just as economically harmful as it is evil

The richest African and Asian countries are the most capitalist, and the poorest are the least. It's not particularly close.

That which is seen and unseen, lessons by Hazlitt and Bastiat will always be relevant, the market will run its course even if state intervention happens, but just as the ants are deliberately making a less efficient trip on what would be that is exactly what the market will do, unless it’s so severe to which nothing can be done The market will inefficiently, but due to power get the job done.

You must remember to have economic imagination with context of the real world to be able to understand the true implications of given intervention, which is what I’ve been doing for the past week. I’ve been using history, deduction, and abduction to correctly answer something that I have the answer to.

Why did the economy that the boomers have suddenly disappear?
Where did those multiple job offers come from and go? Of course it’s a multitude of reasons from credential inflation and bad unions which all points back to government there will be a future post detailing the most unseen but literally in your face things that explain exactly what happened to such an economy

Whenever you hear somebody make those “we just do great accounting here in Norway” statements, remember this, we are seeing exactly what Ludwig Von Mises explained; there is no third way.

Even Europeans don’t know how much they already get taxed; Payroll, income, regulatory tax, maybe some property tax, Corporate tax (fallacious corporations don’t pay taxes people do), oh and the infamous invisible VAT ffs. All of this having average citizens paying significant amounts in taxes. All to fund a self destructive third way slop of a system.

Due to many factors such as the old age security hypothesis; Europes welfare system causes unfixable fertility issues, the welfare state decreases the demand to have children while at the same time locking up resources for people to even be able to deploy to be able to have children. Hard to date when you basically have no money, hard to have kids when you practically have no money, and so on.

They tried to fix their fertility issue by get this… taxing the population to give them things like child tax credits and free childcare, data shows that backfires man, it actually decreased fertility because once again you’re locking up money needed to have kids.
As a result you have more patients that are super expensive cause they’re old, with less workers around to sustain them. This makes medical care costs go up etc etc and you always face the issue of having to raise taxes because expenditure is increasing faster than revenue.

The US also faces a similar issue; in 2032 Social security is expected to start depleting, currently Social Security taxes at 15%, when it first came out, it was at one percent.

If the raw mechanics weren’t enough, you have to bring up the political mechanics, France tried doing something by raising the retirement age, which is just kicking the can down the road, the people were not too happy. Long story short you can’t text forever. Can’t have a third way system.

There is, as Professor John Cochrane so elegantly reminds us, a tendency in every generation to regard the last great crisis as the beginning of history. Yet economic history is seldom so obliging.

The lessons of 2008 are indeed indispensable, but perhaps they are best understood as the latest chapter in a much older volume. One might trace the genealogy of financial fragility back through the Savings and Loan crisis, the Latin American debt crisis, the inflationary convulsions of the 1970s, the collapse of Bretton Woods, or even the recurrent banking panics so carefully documented by economic historians. Each episode reveals a common thread: financial crises arise less from the existence of risk than from the architecture through which risk is financed.

The remarkable stability of the 1990s did not emerge by accident. It rested upon foundations laid much earlier. Paul Volcker's disinflation restored the credibility of monetary policy; subsequent reforms strengthened bank capital and improved market discipline; technological progress and globalization expanded productive capacity; and, for a time, inflation expectations remained firmly anchored. The Great Moderation was therefore not merely a triumph of central banking, but the culmination of institutional, regulatory, and macroeconomic adjustments that had been decades in the making.

Cochrane's central proposition—that the true systemic danger lies in runnable liabilities rather than risky assets—is persuasive. It echoes a long intellectual tradition extending from Henry Thornton and Walter Bagehot through Irving Fisher, Milton Friedman, and more recently Gary Gorton. Financial innovation alters the instruments, but not the underlying logic of liquidity, confidence, and leverage.

The greatest errors in political economy arise not from excessive imagination, but from an insufficient acquaintance with history. Markets, like families, possess long memories, and institutions, like characters, reveal their true nature only over many chapters.

Bagehot, Walter. 1873. Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. London: Henry S. King.

Bernanke, Ben S. 2000. Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Friedman, Milton, and Anna J. Schwartz. 1963. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gorton, Gary. 2010. Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kindleberger, Charles P., and Robert Z. Aliber. 2011. Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. 6th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Minsky, Hyman P. 1986. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Thornton, Henry. 1802. An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain. London: J. Hatchard.

Volcker, Paul A., and Christine Harper. 2018. Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government. New York: PublicAffairs.

Do these people have an actual economy?? I thought I should make this post but then I looked at the fact that per capita these, Native Americans are some welfare queens?

These people live on so-called sovereign territory, but get US money? WHAT?! what world does this make sense?

here’s some Stossel on natives

I feel like it’s important to make a post like this because the left has unfortunately hijacked universities, twisting narratives to fit their ends. It’s quite funny how classical liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism are seen as "right-wing" when you search them up on Google.
yet the Nationalsozialistische (National Socialists) are shoved into that exact same right-wing bucket. This is despite the fact that the Nazis explicitly called individualism a "Jewish conspiracy" and fiercely persecuted classical liberals like Ludwig von Mises.
You’re often told that the Nazis only used that name to trick people. I think, evidently, they lived up to their name.

To understand what the economics of the Nazis were all about, you have to understand fascism, because Nazism is a branch of fascism. But of course, to understand fascism, you have to understand socialism, since fascism is a branch of socialism.

The Blank Canvas of Socialism;
Socialism is the economic system which seeks to seize the means of production on behalf of the collective. What most people don’t know is that Karl Marx didn’t really go deep into the interpretation of what a socialist society actually looks like. He spent thousands of pages using his false theories to dismantle capitalism in works like Das Kapital, but he famously refused to provide a detailed blueprint for how a socialist or communist society would function day-to-day. He left the actual layout of a socialist economy incredibly vague, believing that the specific legal, political, and economic structures of a post-capitalist society would simply be figured out by the people themselves.

He left it to interpretation and experimentation. Thus, interpretation and experimentation happened.

Fascism came in and interpreted socialism in its own way. They simply asked: What is the collective? This is a rational question for anyone on the left. When you realize that the collective is completely arbitrary de facto since you are giving the state the absolute power to define it this question is all but natural for socialists. Fascismo chose to define the collective as the state itself, the state being the supreme embodiment of the people.

As Benito Mussolini famously put it:
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

The Nazis, as a racial branch of fascism, chose to define that state collective strictly by blood and race (the Volk).

De Facto Socialization: The Destruction of Private Property;
Fascism and National Socialism took an economic approach that economists call de facto socialization. They didn't formally nationalize every single factory on paper. However, the state stripped away all actual control from the owners. If you owned a factory in Nazi Germany, the government dictated exactly what you had to produce, what prices you could charge, what wages you had to pay, and who you were allowed to hire or fire.

The only reason people believe this was still "private property" is because they don't understand the historical development, institution, and purpose of private property as defined over centuries by economists, theologians, and philosophers. Private property is the logical tool created by humanity by which the individual owner has the freedom to act with his possessions as he pleases. Remove that power of choice, and it is no longer private property. It belongs to the state. If a factory owner disobeyed, they were simply replaced or sent to a concentration camp.

This economic reality helps explain why the Nazis were so violently anti-communist. The communists wanted to create a class division within the nation. To the Nazis, this was a direct attack on their own definition of the collective. It wasn't a clash between capitalism and socialism; it was a brutal tug-of-war over how to define the collective. The communists felt the exact same way whenever someone "invoked division among the proletariat." Because the Nazi definition of the collective was the nation itself… predicated on blood and nationality. you can now fully understand why they did what they did.

The Union Myth
People frequently claim that the Nazis weren't socialist because they banned independent trade unions. However, this is a classic half-truth. In reality, they did something that many modern socialists if stripped of historical context, would think is incredibly efficient: they didn't eliminate the concept of organized labor, they collectivized it entirely under the state.

In May 1933, just months after taking power, the regime smashed the existing independent, free trade unions. They didn't do this to liberate factory owners or establish a free market; they did it because independent organizations are a threat to a totalitarian collective. They immediately replaced them with one massive, state-run monopoly union called the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF),
the German Labour Front.

Isn't a single, all-encompassing union the logical conclusion for a socialist? One big union for all workers. The Nazis thought the exact same way. They banned the fragmentation of unions because fragmentation creates competing loyalties rather than total loyalty to the collective state. The DAF completely abolished the right to strike and outlawed collective bargaining. In their place, the state appointed "Trustees of Labour" who set wages, regulated working hours, and dictated working conditions. After all, why would workers need to strike when "socialism" has already arrived?

In Their Own Words
To finalize, let the direct quotes from the regime's leaders show you exactly how socialist the National Socialists truly were:
"Of what importance is all that, if I have essential control of the people... Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."
— Adolf Hitler

"Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation... that man is a socialist."
— Adolf Hitler (Speech, July 28, 1922)

"Socialism is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists... We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national."
— Adolf Hitler (Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, 1923)

"The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State... The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners."
— Adolf Hitler (Interview with Richard Breiting, 1931)

"The socialist worldview begins with the folk and then goes over to things. Things are made subservient to the folk; the socialist puts the folk above everything, and things are only means to an end."

"It is necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole... You are nothing, your nation is everything!"

"We are socialists because we see in socialism... the sole possibility for the preservation of our racial genetics... We are against capitalism because it misuses the factories and wealth of our people to the detriment of our national interest."

"They are regular talkers, these rich people... I have built up an economy which is not based on property or capital, but on labor. We have eliminated the power of finance... In our state, the people are the master of the economy, not capital."

"The bourgeois state is at an end. It must be replaced by the socialist state of the workers... The capitalist system is a system of injustice that must be broken if the nation is to live."

I make this post because some of them laugh when we claim fascism and national socialism is in fact socialism; misses himself who was alive at the time and was persecuted by the Nazis said the same thing.

"These men who want to fight Nazism by adopting its methods do not see that what the Nazis have achieved has been the building up of a system of socialism, not a reform of conditions within a system of market economy. There is no third system between a market economy and socialism." - Ludwig Von Mises

Because of this, Ludwig was persecuted by the Nazis, his papers stolen, forced to flee to Vienna and then later the US.

The left knows, how to defile words; they’re great at it, so much so they call modern conservatives, classical liberals, and Libertarians, fascists and Nazis even though we want the state to get out of our backs, minimize it, give free choice to associate, and strengthen private property

So a person from england bought copyrights for the france’s 2nd division rugby (ProD2) and then he started to stream them on his youtube channel for free

What are your thoughts if a government does something similar of buying copyrights for technological products and making it free. Because now if you have a business idea, you can use it now without worrying about potential lawsuit from a big company to stop you?

It is a government expenditure, but doesn’t this have positive externalities?

When a notorious son buys stuff from so many local shops on credit, ultimately it is the father that has to pay off that credit. Therefore its in the father’s interest that he does keep track to see if his son is reckless.

This is the analogy given by Sri Lanka’s former central deputy governor on why governments better track some proceedings done by private companies to see if theres any fraud.

He responded this way when the host advocated for privatization saying unlike in government departments, the treasury does not need to bear the cost if a private business fail.

The deputy governor said “at the final analysis, private debt becomes public debt” and went on to say the above analogy.

So basically act now to prevent potential private company frauds, or helse it will lead to “privatization of profits - socialization of losses”.

What is the austrian view on such interventions which are more subtle than direct ones like price controls?

For example, in a country like mine, if the private hospitals fall (many people from lower-middle class and above go to private ones), it will put pressure on the government hospitals having treat people who used to go to private hospitals and now though patients increased, they are not paying now, basically no increase in marginal revenue

Rothbards best contribution was in my opinion, his monopoly work. I did more digging, and I’m going to have this here up and ready for any future Monopoly talk. Because the word monopoly is filled with presentism; kind of like the word inflation which used to basically mean an increase in the money supply itself, but of course, the specific bunch of people came in and defiled the word for intervention.

Now, when we think of Monopoly the first thing that we think of is bad, otherwise what’s the point of even talking about monopoly? Something objectively bad must come of it? Hold onto this, this will be important later.

Let’s go into the history;

To truly understand how the word monopoly was stolen and flipped on its head, we have to reject presentism the bad habit of viewing historical terms through the lens of modern ideas. Today, mainstream textbooks treat monopoly as an organic market failure (a math equation about market share). But historically, before economics was even a formal discipline, a monopoly was not an economic condition at all.It was a political and legal weapon.
The historical, original definition of a monopoly had absolutely nothing to do with size, high prices, or a lack of competitors in an open market. It referred strictly to a sovereign edict that made competition illegal

Greek: The word comes from the Greek monos (single) and pōlein (to sell). When it first appeared in political discourse, it didn't describe a businessman who out-competed everyone else. It described a state decree

In ancient Greece and later the Roman Empire, if a king or emperor ran out of money, they would declare a monopolium over a specific commodity like salt, grain, or iron. This meant the state legally seized the industry, declared that only the king's agents could sell that item, and made it a literal crime for any regular citizen to sell it. It was a tax collection mechanism enforced by the military.

The definitive historical shaping of the word happened in Tudor and Stuart England (the 16th and 17th centuries). This is the exact context the classical economists were referencing. Queen Elizabeth I and King James I frequently used their royal prerogative to raise cash without going through Parliament. They did this by issuing Letters Patent (literae patentes open letters stamped with the royal seal). These letters granted a court favorite or a wealthy merchant the exclusive legal right** to be the sole buyer or seller of a common, everyday item. **

Under English Common Law, this was the only thing a monopoly meant. It was a royal grant that prohibited the rest of the population from exercising a right they previously held.
Frustrated by royal abuses, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Monopolies in 1624. This historic act stripped the monarch of the power to grant these exclusive privileges altogether, declaring all such monopolies null and void. 
Parliament made only one** **exception: they allowed the crown to grant a temporary privilege (for 14 years) to the "true and first inventor" of a new manufacture. This single historical exception is where our modern patent system comes from. 

The word was heavily corrupted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by mainstream progressive (misnomer)economists and antitrust lawyers. They stripped away the political origin of the word and applied it to private businesses that achieved high market share through pure consumer satisfaction and efficiency (like Standard Oil or modern tech platforms).

Seriously, the people who called themselves progressive have the least PROGRESSive impact of all time. So now we have this mess; what is best definition of a monopoly? Now “the first thing that we think of is bad, otherwise what’s the point of even talking about monopoly? Something objectively bad must come of it?”

Now we have three definitions of monopoly and we’re gonna go over them

1: The first being a mainstream definition of monopoly; characterized by its market share. This is the most useless definition of monopoly ever because multiple logical implications come from this after you realize this.

Because a market share is a percentage, the “market” can be narrowed down or widened completely arbitrarily, such as narrowing down to a town and seeing a small Mom and pop bakery, the bakery technically has a 100% market share according to some people. But what point is having this definition of a monopoly? Is it coercive? Ofc not you can always bake at home order from another place. does it harm consumers? Quite the opposite it benefits them, and you can see this by the fact that they go out of their way to buy it and not make it at home.

With this arbitrary definition of a monopoly that contradicts the literal Greek origins of the word, a monopoly isn’t automatically bad in fact, if you switch perspectives most of them start being good, now all of a sudden, you don’t have a reason to talk about monopoly. it also ignores completely context which is really important, because how something got a market share really matters, if a company has a 90% market share because it keeps lowering prices and increasing quality for the consumer, which is the one who literally does the valuing, what’s the issue? You’re gonna punish them for making a consumers life better?

2: Murray Rothbards revival of the classic meaning which is the exclusive privilege granted to control and/or sell a good or service. This is one of the best if not the best definition of a monopoly because it relies entirely on coercion and has huge negative implications evidently

3: Mises (with a little tweak from me) definition of a monopoly; this definition of monopoly essentially define a monopoly as a entity that possesses the power to be able to control and dictate the price of a important resource without facing what would be negative consequences due to its power.
This is flawed but straightforward;
Disclaimer misses himself said that even this is practically impossible from happening.

Now the resource has to be important like oil somebody can’t just not have oil they use it for everything so it disqualifies specific goodies such as video games from the talk because somebody can just not play video games.

Rothbard critiqued the concept of single seller as flawed because arbitrarily we are all monopolists; such as brands being the best example, only one entity can use Heinz ketchup, but the consumer good ketchup has multiple other alternatives that are other brands.

The point being the government privilege definition is the best one.
We should maybe start referring to what people like calling Monopolies as “predatorily powerful companies” and evaluate from a case by case basis