Category: Economics
-
Herr Jordan, die Schweiz braucht eine neutrale Währung!
Angesichts globaler Konflikte und grassierender Inflation dürfte sich eine Investition der Schweizerischen Nationalbank in Bitcoin als langfristig kluge Entscheidung erweisen. Zusammen mit Luzius Meisser, Gründer der Bitcoin Association Switzerland, habe ich einen Beitrag zur Debatte verfasst, ob und in welchem Umfang die Schweizerische Nationalbank Bitcoins erwerben und halten solle. Der Beitrag ist in der Aprilausgabe…
-
Bitcoin at 10 – Money in a World of Tokens
On this very day ten years ago – January 3, 2009 –, the Bitcoin network went live. Bitcoin’s first block, the Genesis Block, includes a short message as a reminder that the world was, at the time, finding itself in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the 1920s. The message refers to the…
-
Negative interest rates and the redistribution of…
The background Negative interest rates are currently a hot topic. Mainstream economists consider them necessary since overall public debt levels are at historic highs (as a result, monetary policy has continuously adopted the goals of fiscal policy), the stability of the financial system is fragile due to high-risk assets in the balance sheets of banks…
-
Bitcoin’s Value Is Purely Subjective
While one Bitcoin token is currently approaching 5’000 US$, many people wonder why Bitcoin has «value» in the first place. The first question that arises: Might those people actually mean «price» instead of «value»? Well, the concepts of price and value are entirely different. They cannot be the same logically. A person only sells, or…
-
Why Liberals Should Be More Optimistic
Optimists think that the course of events will be positive, for them personally or for society in general. Realists, on the other hand, think that the course of events might turn out to be positive; they concede, however, that they can’t really know since reality consists of complex phenomena. Optimism and realism are sometimes used…
-
The Fallacious Romance of Politics with the Concept of Public Interest
The theory that there exists a thing called „public interest“ is a fallacious belief based on a romantic idea of political man. In truth, the overwhelming evidence shows us that governments are more likely to fail than markets, and when they do, the consequences of their failure are more catastrophic. Political man vs. economic man…
-
The Right to Be Let Alone in a World of Cultural Diversity
The right to be let alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis famously put it in “Olmstead v. United States”, is commonly associated with the right to privacy in the Fourth Amendment. The constitutional “[…] right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures […]” critically separates…
-
Why Freedom Is Favored by Secession and Subsidiarity
Majority voting inevitably alienates large parts of a population. As a Swiss citizen, I am all too aware of that fact, since we go to the polls as often as six times a year. This may be the necessary price of our more direct form of representative democracy. But in Switzerland, it has also led…
-
The War Against Cash in Europe
There are good reasons why the debate on cash is heating up right now. While European governments and central banks have stepped up capital controls in the last few years, cash has become the major hurdle for conventional monetary policy. Therefore, many economists, as well as a number of high-ranking government officials, have presented and…