Sublime

Saint Milton Friedman taught us that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. A central bank, by printing too much money, can bring about inflation and destroy a currency, all things being equal. But that is the tricky part of that equation, because not all things are equal.

Hayek rechazó este sistema y dijo que el control estatal de la economía privaría a las personas de su libertad, aún tratándose de economía mixta.

One is the neoclassical rational-choice-equilibrium argument that markets automatically come to the Pareto optimal equilibrium for society. This was Ken Arrow and Debreu’s great work. The second is more out of the Hayekian tradition, that markets are efficient at processing distributed information to help coordinate activity in the economy. But

The private sector allocates resources where they will earn the highest return. In contrast, the government allocates resources wherever the political process sends them.

“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

There are today two main government‐approved mainstream schools of economic thought: Keynesians and Monetarists. While these two schools have widely disparate methodologies and analytical frameworks, and while they are engaged in bitter academic fights accusing each other of not caring about the poor, the children, the environment, inequality, or

At the time, a fierce debate was raging about whether centrally planned economies like that of the Soviet Union—in other words, economies where there was a single core responsible for creating and distributing goods and services—worked better than free market economies where planning and production were done by an undirected, decentralized crowd.

This “fiscal drag,” as Burton Malkiel has called it, stems from two things. First, taxes take money out of our pockets, which necessarily diminishes our purchasing power and therefore our utility.

Stiglitz employs Isaiah Berlin’s positive and negative freedoms, and later threads the needle: neoliberalism believes only in ‘freedom to do’, and disparages the need of government to constrain corporations and the wealthy for the good of the rest: