Throughout American history, politicians have incessantly awarded preferential policies (e.g., “corporate welfare”) to special interests that has allowed them to create monopolies dominating virtually every major market.
America's "defense" budget is really more than $1.2 trillion, more than double the Pentagon's official "base budget," once we include all the other related spending like that on "homeland security" and veterans affairs.
Just as unilateral free trade results in a more solid economy for the countries that adopt it — even within an international economy of protectionism in other countries — so would a commodity-money based economy surrounded by fiat-money economies.
What are the different concepts of financial risk? How do Austrian economists conceive of risk, uncertainty, and probability? Christian Hoffmann, parting ways with Mises, provides a taxonomy and cautions about the predominance of probability statistics in the realm of economics and finance.