A very interesting review of Rothbard v. The Philosophers up at Reason.
| [...]A very interesting review of Rothbard v. The Philosophers up at Reason.
| [...]As readers of this blog know, in an astounding feat of oblivious irony, Time magazine has chosen the man who very likely just broke the world as "Person of the Year". In my last post, I commented on the propaganda aspects of the choice. In this article, I [...]
To be filed under the "It's About Time" department:
Those who follow the Mises Economics Blog via RSS feed reader may be pleased to learn that they now have the option to follow comments for a specific blog post via their feed reader. Next to the comment count at the [...]
One thing I like to do around the office is bamboozle colleagues with faux-knowledge of the newest technologies. Stephan Kinsella taught me this: he has been intimidating me for years with this tactic.
Throw around a few buzz words and scrappy tech talk. Then when the colleague sheepishly asks [...]
[In 1947, Arthur W. Binns, president of the National Home and Property Owners Foundation, wrote the following short essay for American Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 37.]
Very seldom do the proponents of public housing say frankly that they [...]
Washington celebrated yesterday. A controversial public figure with a decade-long record of professional failure "resigned" under pressure from his superiors.
No, not Ben Bernake. Vinny Cerrato, the Washington Redskins general manager, resigned and was promptly replaced by Bruce Allen, the son of a former Redskins coach (and brother of a [...]
It's that time of the year when everyone wants to know the economic future. Although economists are highly involved in the prognostication business, their forecasting skill is about as good as guessing. FULL ARTICLE by Douglas French
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At the story's end, Scrooge awakens and begins throwing money out the window. In the mind of Dickens, Scrooge has now justified his existence by abandoning the rational decision making that has made his firm successful. FULL ARTICLE by Butler Shaffer
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It is often the "noobs" who are at the forefront of the flamewars, getting their feelings hurt and lashing out, creating a spiral to the bottom. Experienced users distinguish substantive discussions from personality clashes. FULL ARTICLE by Jeffrey Tucker
| [...]From the "government must protect me from a social network I joined voluntarily" department:
Facebook's new privacy settings are the subject of a complaint filed to the FTC. The social-networking site's latest revamp makes it harder to shield information and photos from the general Facebook public. That [...]
I just received (as in 20 minutes ago) a giant package in the mail with The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism published in 2008 by Sage and Cato, and edited by Ronald Hamowy with more contributors than I can possibly list (but they include many writers for Mises.org).
I must [...]
The site was down briefly. It was the sound of large new swaths of this site going open source, with perfect integration between a beta and real. Now we can begin implementing many changes made by volunteer coders.
| [...]Once again, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has announced its intention to continue to artificially keeping interest rates "exceptionally low" for a "extended period."
Missed in virtually all the commentaries is the key question: Should a central bank try to manipulate interest rates? Lost in all the debate [...]
I just recalled interesting article by Michael Boldin of the Tenth Amendment Center, Randy Barnett and the Destruction of Federalism. I had made some comments on it to someone in email, which are adapted below. I also commented on this previously in [...]
It was Austrian economics and its proponents who raised eyebrows when they first explored the writings of what is here referred to as "standard Law & Economics," i.e., mainly the thought of Judge Richard Posner. FULL ARTICLE by Martin Fronek
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When an Austrian economist considers the structure of production, he doesn't just dwell on crude aggregates, such as the total value of capital goods. Rather, he considers how long (or how "roundabout") a given structure of production is. FULL ARTICLE by J. Grayson Lilburne
' [...]
It will become illegal to refuse to insure any consumer on any grounds, including evidence of insurability. In addition to being unable to exclude future enrollees, insurers will be prevented from legally dropping any consumers from their plans. FULL ARTICLE by Eric M. Staib
[...]If you have come through the Mises University program, are an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, sometimes present at the Austrian Scholars Conference, or are already a member of the Mises Scholars list, you are eligible to sign up for the newly migrated list at Google: Mises Scholars. The [...]
I was reminded recently of an amazing, powerful, withering attack on antisemitism and socialism, reprinted a few years ago in Mises Daily. It's by Mises, The Socialist Calumny Against the Jews, and is taken from from Omnipotent Government (1944). What an incredible mind Mises had.
[...]Intel needs to crush the Federal Trade Commission.
A legal victory won't suffice. Intel can surely obtain that result, but only after six or seven years of litigation in a system that is rigged to favor the FTC. But by that time, nobody will care about the legal result.
' [...]Paul Krugman suggests that cutting the minimum wage won't help employment. My hope here is to uncover his errors.
First, Krugman makes the argument for cutting the minimum wage. He states:
Here's how the fallacy [of composition] works: if some subset of the work force accepts lower wages, it' [...]
"We Need a Housing Bubble" Krugman got a Nobel in Economics. "Let's Ramp Up a Murderous, Useless War" Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize. So what do we give Helicopter Ben Bernanke, who has squandered much of whatever capital we had left after the housing bubble burst by pushing [...]
The Federal Trade Commission launched its long-expected Pearl Harbor attack on Intel today:
FTC Challenges Intel's Dominance of Worldwide Microprocessor Markets
FTC Charges Anticompetitive Tactics Have Stifled Innovation and Harmed Consumers
The Federal Trade Commission today sued Intel Corp., the world's leading computer chip maker, charging that the company has illegally [...]
"Libertarian centralism" advocates using the federal constitution - specifically, the 14th amendment - to strike down state and local laws deemed contradictory to individual rights. The anti-centralism argument, frequently expressed here by Stephan Kinsella, holds that expanding federal power is not a valid means of protecting individual liberty. Centralism [...]
A discussion in the comments section of a post about blackmail brings up an issue about which many libertarians are confused. This concerns the idea of "harm." Libertarians often condemn "harming" others, and this is fine so far as it goes, if it is kept in [...]
Poland is home to some very committed and energetic free-market organizations and individuals. My recent trip to Warsaw, for example, was hosted and sponsored by the Polish Ludwig von Mises Institute. FULL ARTICLE by Arthur Foulkes
[...]
A money-substitute can be embodied either in a banknote or in a demand deposit with a bank subject to check ("checkbook money" or deposit currency), provided the bank is prepared to exchange the note or the deposit daily free of charge against money proper. FULL ARTICLE by Ludwig [...]
It was January 2008 when I first set foot in Dubai. It was a land full of grandiose, landmark projects. Few cities in the world could match the sheer number of high-rise buildings and skyscrapers being built in the emirate. FULL ARTICLE by Fernando Ulrich
[...]Congratulations to Peter Klein whose 2008 paper, "Opportunity Discovery, Entrepreneurial Action, and Economic Organization," was named by Wiley-Blackwell as the mostly-highly-read paper for 2009 in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. The paper offers an Austrian critique of the opportunity-discovery perspective in the academic entrepreneurship literature and suggests an alternative approach [...]
We are living in a time when government is growing by leaps and bounds, and increasingly intruding into our lives.
The dangers from growing government may be encapsulated under a variety of headings that I discuss in an article of mine that appears today in the Christrian Science Monitor online, under [...]
In view of the recent passing of Paul Samuelson, it may be worthwhile to recall the "Symposium: On the Occasion of the Eighteenth Edition of Paul Samuelson's Economics" in the Summer 2005 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, which contained Samuelson and Rothbard: Two Texts and Two [...]
The same week that MGM's $8.5 billion CityCenter is unveiled, the Sahara Hotel has closed two of its hotel towers for the holidays due to low demand.
This closure comes on the heels of Binion's closing its 365 rooms downtown.
October marked the 22nd straight month of declining gaming [...]
"My main message in today's meeting was very simple: that America's banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry and now that they're back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy," President Obama said after the meeting.
In the' [...]
The cities in the Intermountain region that boomed the most: Las Vegas, Phoenix and Boise are now suffering the most according to a report from the Brookings Institution, with the intermountain region as a whole suffering more than the rest of the nation.
"It's tough. One thing to take" [...]
Milton makes plain why a lack of competition and the presence of central control in the market of ideas is detrimental. The market of goods and services is not so different. FULL ARTICLE by Isaac M. Morehouse
[...]
The whole premise of this cute book rests on a basic economic error. This leads ultimately to the unraveling of Waldfogel's case against Christmas giving, however much it reveals about Austrian v. mainstream economists. FULL ARTICLE by Mark Thornton
[...]
Criticizing the Fed chairman for a lack of prescience is like criticizing a dog for an inability to recite the alphabet. When something is physiologically and economically impossible, why bother? FULL ARTICLE by Stephen Mauzy
[...]Walter Block discussed his Defending the Undefendable and related libertarian ideas on The Peter Mac Show last weekend. The MP3 file is here (should be up on Peter Mac Show's site later; local file).
' [...]I was a guest on the Bill Handel Show yesterday discussing the libertarian perspective on blackmail, with reference to the Tiger Woods and other cases. (See my post Blackmail should be legal: the case of David Letterman.) We also touched on common law [...]
Against Intellectual Property has been translated into Italian by Mr. Robert Newson: Contro La Proprietà Intellettuale (.doc file). Translations into Spanish, Polish, Portugese and Georgian have been made as well.
[...]This Wednesday at about 1:30pm EST I'm doing a phone interview with Judge Napolitano on my recent article about the fate of the USD. (It's for his TV show, but I am leaving town right after and so can't make it to a studio.) If some tech-savvy person could' [...]
Random House is claiming to own exclusive digital rights to books published in print decades ago. The old author's contract specified print rights - which is bad enough. Now Random House claim that this applies to digital rights: so if you wrote a book twenty years ago, you do [...]
John Perry Barlow's 1994 Wired article, "The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age," tagged: "(Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)", is a classic. Written at the dawn of the Internet, it's amazing how non-dated it is. It's a fascinating, well-written, [...]
Austrians are divided on the long-term outlook for prices. In the present article I want to reiterate why I view rising prices as the real threat. I also want to point out some problems for the deflation camp. FULL ARTICLE by Robert Murphy
[...]
The abuses of the term "human rights" are well known among academics. But every now and then it breaks into the public eye when the arbiters of our "rights" stretch the concept beyond all recognition. FULL ARTICLE by Ben O'Neill
' [...]
A certain Talmudical philosopher once offered us this apothegm: "The noblest charity is to prevent a man from accepting charity, and the best alms are to show and enable a man to dispense with alms." FULL ARTICLE by F.A. Harper
[...]
Frank Capra was America's preeminent filmmaker in the 1930s. He gave moviegoers tales of paper-money fixes for economic problems: Keynesianism with family values. FULL ARTICLE by Doug French
[...]Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 - December 13, 2009), first American Nobel Prize laureate (1970) has died, at the age of 94.
I was lucky to meet him at the M.I.T on the glorious day of November 9, 1989, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the [...]
Almost every libertarian has been confronted with such exclamations as, "But surely we need government to provide "X"!
Inspired by such fearless thinkers as Walter Block (especially his great book Defending the Undefendable), LvMI Forum members do not shy away from confronting such issues head-on. Here are some threads" [...]
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals waved the red flag this week on four-and-a-half years of antitrust litigation alleging NASCAR has an illegal monopoly over itself. A three-judge panel unanimously upheld a lower court's dismissal of Kentucky Speedway's demand that NASCAR be forced to stage a Sprint Cup race [...]
It is Doug French who first pointed out the obvious to me: It is not "Interest Rates Are Low, but Banks Balk at Refinancing" but rather "Interest Rates Are Low, and Therefore Banks Balk at Refinancing."
From an obit for Paul Samuelson. Thanks to his work
No student would ever again rest comfortably with the 19th-century nostrum that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
Richard Rahn is one of the few writers out there who keeps up with the underground economy and its size and scope - which is a fantastic thing to do because this is a leading indicator of the status of freedom itself. The larger the state, the larger the underground. [...]
For students wondering where the depression-resistant, high-paying jobs are, the USA Today reports that the percentage of federal government workers making over $100,000 per year increased from 15% to 19% during the current downturn's first year and a half.
"The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal" [...]
"It's not the first time a skyscraper has gone up as the economy swooned." Hmmm. Sounds oddly familiar.
Note: Corrected the second link. Thanks Mark.
' [...]If there's one thing the overpaid prima donnas of the sports media enjoy more then gossiping about a professional golfer's marital problems, it's morally condemning the Bowl Championship Series. I've addressed "BCS rage" before, so I won't spend much time on this, but I would note this irrationally hysterical [...]
...is transforming "health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one" [...]
That's the title of my article at The American Conservative. It may smack of paranoid conspiracy theories to some readers, but as the principal in the Simpsons said when the students overheard him predicting that they had no future, "Prove me wrong kids, prove me wrong." An excerpt:
The "Texas" [...]
I just have one question: What if Tiger Woods stops playing golf?
This is not the forum to recap the media-fueled scandals that have enveloped Woods since Thanksgiving. This is an economics blog. So let's talk economics.
Much like a Fed-induced credit bubble, the mainstream press has inflated a Tiger bubble. [...]
[From chapter 12 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.]
Approximately forty centuries later the farmers of America were faced with an economic disability of proportions. In this case the hurt was not caused by nature but by the law of the land. There was [...]
Last night CNBC premiered "The Bubble Decade" with host David Faber looking back at the three boom-and-bust episodes of the past 10 years--tech, real estate and private equity. It will replay Sunday and no doubt many more times in the coming weeks and months.
Leaving aside the analysis at [...]
Instead of working against war and the police state, instincts were diverted to the preposterous cause of creating a statist system for global thermometer management. FULL ARTICLE by Lew Rockwell
[...]
Barack Obama has said, "I will not rest until all Americans who want to work can." Yet Mr. Obama's policies belie his words. In fact, what his administration is doing will ensure economic stagnation. FULL ARTICLE by Benjamin Weingarten
[...]
Ludwig von Mises died in 1973. In light of the current recession, the intellectual history of the last two centuries, and what we know about the prerequisites for growth and prosperity, we can learn much by reading and studying Mises. FULL ARTICLE by Art Carden
[...]
This is just the beginning. We have some startling projects on the way, to be unveiled week by week in the coming year. We are using every tool we have available and implementing the newest ones as they come along. FULL ARTICLE by Douglas French
[...]Paul Krugman has sunk to a subterranean depth of pettiness in his New York Times post calling Austrians The new Larouchies:
Hmm. I'm fairly accustomed to having speaking events disrupted by Larouchies (when I was in Cambridge a while back we had a guy yelling about banana fungus, among other' [...]
The Federal Trade Commission illegally published the private financial data of William H. Isely, the 84-year-old target of a recently dismissed FTC complaint, on the agency's website (www.ftc.gov) sometime in the past few days. Isely submitted the confidential information to the FTC as part of an application to recover over [...]
Hans F. Sennholz (1922–2007)
To Rebuild the Ethical Foundation
By Hans F. Sennholz
[The Freeman, Vol. 12 (1962), pp. 90–91]
Albert Schweitzer, in his Decay and Restoration of Civilization, expressed his hopes for the survival of civilization in the following words:
[...]The Just War doctrine was hammered out some 1600 years ago with the idea of restraining states. But there is a problem: states end up grading their own tests for what constitutes a just or unjust war. No surprise at the results: the state always finds that it own wars [...]
After all the government subsidies that have been poured into home ownership in America since the Great Depression, raising the percentage of homeowners to over 69% in 2004, the WSJ reports that defaulting and renting: "It's just a better life. It really is."
"For the 4.8 million U.S. households" [...]
Congressmen Ron Paul and Alan Grayson seek to bring more transparency and accountability to the U.S. central bank and "to subject the Fed's monetary policy and discount-lending actions to an audit by the Government Accounting Office (GAO)." See the full letter and sign below (include affiliation please) in support
[...]We had some sense that it was time for a new edition of Mises's Theory of Money and Credit, first published in German in 1912, at the very dawn of the age of central banking. Mises patiently explains the origin of money and hammers out a solution to the' [...]
Is the State ordered in the nature of things? The classical theorists in political science were so persuaded. They believed that political organization enjoyed divine sanction. FULL ARTICLE by Frank Chodorov
What are they doing to merit such ill will and legal persecution? Are they truly unscrupulous, greedy parasites who dupe fans and injure the athletic organizations? FULL ARTICLE by Briggs Armstrong
[...]
"Yet the future of the dollar is precarious," Mises presciently penned in The Theory of Money and Credit, "dependent on the vicissitudes of the continuing struggle between a small minority of economists on the one hand and hosts of ignorant demagogues and their 'unorthodox' allies on the other hand." [...]
This post is one in a series entitled Posthumous Refutations. Previously in this series: The Seen and Unseen of Obama's Stimulus Plans.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders appeared on the Colbert Report on Tuesday (H/T "Hard Rain" from the Mises Forums). Stephen Colbert started off addressing Sanders' socialism. It' [...]
North Koreans are protesting after the government "seized most of its citizens' money and savings via a new-currency issue."
"Pyongyang announced Nov. 30 its decision to issue new currency and limit the amount of old currency that could be exchanged to the equivalent of about $40, based on unofficial'" [...]
What just happened? A 90-year-old winner of a Medal of Honor pulls the political card to trump a contract he freely signed. And the White House is involved (at some level, anyway).
If only the homeowners association would have put up a fight.
Note: So what was the supposed reason [...]
So says Adam Mossoff, Objectivist law professor, here:
Just FYI, I am just about to complete my first draft of my article, tentatively titled, "A Value-Based Theory of Intellectual Property," in which I explain why intellectual property rights are a fundamental property right. In fact, my thesis can be [...]
"The Frogs" is the oldest expression of Greshman's Law. Let us, with the same cruel humor, make fun of our condition as Americans the same way Aristophanes did of the condition of Athenians. FULL ARTICLE by Clifford F. Thies
[...]
A business in the private sector is utterly and completely dependent on customers for its revenue, so the revenue they spend on gift giving necessarily comes from the customers too! Why do they believe that they are fostering good will? FULL ARTICLE by Jeffrey Tucker
[...]
Maybe the mechanism of action we know as government cannot be operated in a "proper" way at all, because no intellectual device exists that permits us to properly determine just what is "good" or "bad" government. FULL ARTICLE by William Anderson
[...]Drastic times call for drastic measures. The current crisis has brought global central banks to their knees. Interest rates have been lowered to zero, or nearly so, in a concerted attempt to stimulate investment and consumption spending. The effect has been minimal.
While quantitative easing - the method central bankers employ [...]
"The patent system: End it, don't mend it"--"From AIDS to Android phones, research shows that intellectual property rights are detrimental to the social good." Superb, concise piece in The Christian Science Monitor, by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly.
It is common to argue' [...]
The Home Study Course now has a free support forum. This used to be the classroom space for paid tutorials. Now it is open for everyone. However, no professor is present. It will still help people, however.
[...]This post is one in a series entitled Posthumous Refutations. Previously in this series: Safeway and Consumer Sovereignty in Oakland, CA.
After doubling down on Afghanistan, President Obama is proving a profligacy to rival that of his predecessor as he announces that he's going to double down on [...]
[From chapter 8 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.]
As everyone knows, an analogy is neither evidence nor proof. And yet, since Aristotle it has been common practice among political scientists to call upon an analogy to support a theory [...]
The WSJ reports there are as many as 600-700 foreclosure auctions each weekday in Phoenix.
"'The banks are so screwed up,' says Mr. Mirmelli, the Phoenix investor, that they don't always have a clear idea of the value of the property they are foreclosing on."
' [...]
Few serious books have had such little impact on contemporary thought and policy as this treatise. The world continues to ignore or reject it while it is clinging to antiquated notions and practices. FULL ARTICLE by Hans F. Sennholz
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The first thing done is to confuse cash with produce, then paper money with cash; and from these two confusions it is pretended that a reality can be drawn. FULL ARTICLE by Frederic Bastiat
[...]
Low interest rates don't especially make lending to small businesses worth the heightened risk. Moreover, if a bank can afford to, it will likely take all the bad-debt charge-offs possible in the fourth quarter. FULL ARTICLE by Doug French
By Paul L. Poirot
[The Freeman, vol. 10 (1963), pp. 404–405]
When men claim independence, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes…."
So said certain Americans of 1776, reflecting such high regard for the dignity of individuals as to [...]
This post is one in a series entitled Posthumous Refutations. Previously in this series: What That Jobs Report Might Really Mean.
This series sets the writings of Mises, Rothbard, and other departed Austrian economists against the economic illiterates staffing today's punditry. Of course, while it might seem more fitting [...]
Friends of freedom are frequently accused of being "extremists" in not being willing to "compromise" with a "reasonable" amount of government regulation, welfare redistribution, and social intervention.
But who really is the extremist, the advocate of liberty who respects diversity and differences among men and their beliefs and actions, [...]
