LibertyVoter.Org

By Peter G. Klein

Steve Mariotti writes in Huffington Post about the discovery of Mises’s personal papers in a Moscow archive. As discussed here, rumors that the Soviets had acquired Mises’s papers from the Nazis after World War II began swirling after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Two German scholars described the papers in a 1993 book, and American economist Richard Ebeling visited the archives in 1996 and brought back copies and a detailed report. Guido Hülsmann relies heavily on the archives in his 2007 biography of Mises. It’s an exciting story, and an indication of Mises’s importance in the eyes of his Nazi and Soviet opponents.

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Mises Updates

In his Mises Daily article today, Frank Hollenbeck takes a look at the Recession of 1937 and its causes to shed some light on the Fed’s present reluctance to cut back on endless monetary “stimulus.”

By late 1936, The Fed started to get worried, and in March 1937 the chairman of he Fed, Martin Eccles, said “[r]ecovery is now under way, but if it were permitted to become a runaway boom it would be followed by another disastrous crash.”

In December 1936, the central bank began sterilizing the gold inflows so they no longer boosted monetary growth. This was a timid tapering by contemporary standards. Monetary growth slowed from 12 percent to essentially nothing. This was the equivalent of gently tapping on the brakes.

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By John P. Cochran

Many argue the bigger the boom the greater the bust. More correct is:

The bigger the boom, the greater the mis-direction of production – over consumption, and malinvestment.

How devastating the bust becomes depends more on the degree of interventions which impede recovery. Thus, the greater the interventions in the economy that prevent resource re-allocation and adjustment to malinvestments and consumed capital, the more severe the bust, the slower the recovery and the greater the possibility of a renewed boom-bust.

See:

Hayek’s Law and Rothbard’s Wisdom

Capital in Disequilibrium: Understanding the “Great Recession” and the Potential for Recovery

And

Recessions: The Don’t Do List

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Mark Thornton

Retired Canadian economist David Laidler is interviewed by Russ Roberts on EconTalk. It is a wide ranging interview where monetarism and the financial crisis are discussed. Laidler at several points, including around the 20 minute mark says that it was the Austrians who got it right in both 1929 and 2005 and the monetarists just missed it both times. He even admits that he can say such things because he is retired and doesn’t have to face the wrath of journal editors for his remarks.

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information, allegations of official deception of Congress and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs, alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies, and systematic efforts to undercut the use of the encryption that secures communications and financial information. On October 9, the Cato Institute will be hosting a conference focusing on these issues and more, featuring keynote addresses by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), and Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

• Details & Registration
• “NSA Abuses,” A Selection of Work from Cato’s Scholars on the NSA Scandal

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Source: CATO HEADLINES

By Gene Healy

Gene Healy

“Dear NSA/CSS family,” begins a Sept. 13, 2013, letter to employees and “extended family” of the nation’s largest spy agency from NSA director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the boss of the family (CSS stands for Central Security Service, an NSA subagency).

In the missive, published Thursday by Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake.com, Alexander and his lieutenant, John C. Inglis, fret that: “Our agency has frequently been portrayed in the news as more of a rogue element than a national treasure.”

If each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the source of domestic strife for the “NSA family” is particularly unusual. Rollicked by former family member Edward Snowden’s exposure of secret domestic surveillance programs, NSA is suffering Watergate-era “flashbacks,” and morale “has plummeted,” the LA Times reports.

But these troubles are self-inflicted — and a letter packed with distortions isn’t likely to help.

The “Dear Family” letter repeats what the agency told Congress this summer that NSA has kept “the nation and its allies safe from 54 different terrorist plots … just part of the great work that your family members are doing every day.”

But as Gosztola points out, pressed on that claim by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., back in August, Inglis retreated, conceding that the secret programs were instrumental in only one case, a 2009 New York subway bombing plot.

Even there, the program in question (PRISM, an email and web-traffic monitoring tool) was unnecessary, since the FBI already had ample justification for a warrant.

When it comes to the call-records dragnet, the Washington Post reports, “The case that the NSA points to as its primary example of the program’s usefulness” wasn’t an interdicted terror plot — it involved a Somalia-born San Diego cabbie who sent $8,500 to a terrorist group in his home country. The NSA hoovered up every American’s calling records and all we got was one lousy cabdriver.

“We self-report [our] mistakes,” the letter boasts. But as Marcy Wheeler notes, “the most shocking disclosure from” an internal NSA audit leaked by Snowden, “that an analyst tried to pull up Egypt’s calls but got D.C.’s instead—had never been disclosed” to the FISA court.

Gen. Alexander may think it’s media bias that’s made Americans fear an NSA gone “rogue.” But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admits “our history is regretfully replete with abuse.”

Clapper said, “There is some substantial basis for people to be suspicious,” in an interview for Mark Ambinder’s 2013 book …read more

Source: OP-EDS

By Joseph Salerno

The U.S. government and the establishment media are in a quandary. How are they to explain the heinous attack on a Kenyan shopping mall by Al Shabab a militant Somali group with links to al-Qaida which left 59 innocent civilians dead and another 175 injured, with the victims ranging in age from  2 to 79 years old? After all, since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, U.S politicians of all stripes have repeatedly hammered home the message that “fundamentalist” Islamists hate us and want to kill us simply because we are free and prosperous. But Kenya is neither. According to the  Index of Freedom in the World that attempts to measure economic, civil, and political liberties, Kenya ranks 91 out of the 123 countries included in the index. As for prosperity, based on the CIA World Factbook 2012, Kenya’s per capita GDP was estimated to be $1,700 per year which ranks 192 out of 225 countries.

Could it be that Al Shabab was telling the truth about the reason for its murderous assault yesterday when it tweeted: “For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now its time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land.” After all 4,000 Kenyans troops invaded and have been occupying part of Somalia since 2011. But then this raises the uncomfortable possibility that terrorist attacks by militant Muslim groups on the U.S and its interests throughout the world were not motivated by envy and hatred of our freedoms and high standard of living. Maybe, just maybe, Ron Paul was right and they were provoked by incessant U.S. meddling in the Middle East since World War 2 through numerous wars and economic embargoes including on food and medicine and the billions of dollars sent to payoff and prop up tyrannical and oppressive regimes that do U.S bidding, e.g., the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt.

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE