BankNotes Archive – October 2016

When I graduated high school, my parents and I decided that I would go to community college before proceeding to university. This was to sharply reduce the cost of college (two years of tuition, rather than four), and thereby keep us from taking out college loans. Surprisingly, this economical choice … Read more

by Ron Paul The Wells Fargo bank account scandal took center stage in the news last week and in all likelihood will continue to make headlines for many weeks to come. What Wells Fargo employees did in opening bank accounts without customers’ authorization was obviously wrong, but in true Washington … Read more

by Steven Horwitz Critics of liberalism and the market economy have made a long-standing habit of inventing terms we would never use to describe ourselves. The most common of these is “neo-liberal” or “neo-liberalism,” which appears to mean whatever the critics wish it to mean to describe ideas they don’t … Read more

by Lawrence H. White The controversy over whether Alexander Hamilton’s image should be replaced on the $10 bill, outraged commentators made many extravagant claims on behalf of Hamilton’s wisdom in matters of money and banking policy. He was decidedly retrograde in pushing for an exclusive nationwide bank with a sweetheart … Read more

by Corey DeAngelis In his famous 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” the venerated economist, Milton Friedman, proposed replacing our government-run system of schooling with a school choice voucher.  Although, Friedman argued, the public interest in an educated citizenry meant that the government had a compelling interest in … Read more

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor. -EMERSON Wrote Baltasar Gracian, the Spanish philosopher and satirist two centuries before Emerson: The larger the number of gifts [talents] the … Read more

by Ludwig von Mises The authors who think that they have substituted, in the analysis of the market economy, a holistic or social or universalistic or institutional or macroeconomic approach for what they disdain as the spurious individualistic approach delude themselves and their public. For all reasoning concerning action must … Read more