Contrary to what inequality researcher Thomas Piketty and his colleagues claim, the gap between rich and poor in the USA has barely widened over the years. The tax data has been misinterpreted. Once again, ideology is pitted against facts.
What conservatives and liberals often have in common is their opposition to certain forms of dirigiste and tendentially collectivist political measures. However, this is driven by very different motives, as elucidated by Friedrich A. von Hayek. The difference is still of high relevance today.
The USA and the EU have recently been in a subsidy race—industrial policy by bureaucrats. The innovative forces of the market are being undermined and the inefficiency of these measures is predictable.
Inflation is profoundly socially unjust. Its causes lie above all in an expansionary monetary policy, and this must be stopped. If policymakers want to prevent the inevitable recession that will follow, they will only make the problems worse.
In Germany, there is a growing gap between the inflation of the state apparatus and its ability to fulfill its tasks. Politics suffers from political fantasies of omnipotence and constitutional ignorance. Who is to blame?
AUSTRIAN ACADEMY 2022: Experienced economist Philip Booth, formerly research director of the London Institute of Economic Affairs and now a professor at Catholic Twickenham University in London, introduces the complex issue of global-level regulation from a consistently liberal perspective.
In principle, it is the task of central banks to anticipate and combat inflationary risks. But since central banks failed to recognize inflationary pressures for a long time and then downplayed them as temporary, they can no longer contain inflation in a hurry. What solutions are feasible?
