6b.) P: Mises.org 2015-02-21 00:44:12

2024-02-09

No one was surprised last November when the Pentagon failed its sixth audit, serving up a sorry record of zero and six. The accomplishment received little mainstream media coverage. Scott Ritter excoriated his former employer (and mine) over the fraud, pointing out that the money wasted and the scope of the United States military activity is so massive, it is nearly incomprehensible to most Americans.
Ritter points out that audits are done by accountants, and while failing these audits is undesirable, passing them also means very little. His assessment? “When you allocate money to a system that has been allowed to become conditioned to operate without accountability, don’t be surprised when the shiny mansion on the hill you thought you were buying turns out to be little more than a house

2024-02-09

Ludwig von Mises spends a good deal of time attacking the German Historical School of Economics in Human Action and other works. The doctrines of the school are no longer influential, although as the philosopher and economist Birsen Filip notes in her recent book The Early History of Economics in the United States: The Influence of the German Historical School of Economics on Teaching and Theory (Routledge, 2023), things were once different. Germany was the principal place for graduate work in economics in the years from the latter part of the nineteenth century to World War I. The leading lights of the school—who included Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, Karl Knies, and Gustav Schmoller—were scholars of immense erudition who impressed many of their contemporaries, and many people

2024-02-07

A December 19, 2023, article by Brett Arends on MarketWatch caught my eye with the oh-so-clickable title of “This Is the Scariest Number for Social Security.” Given the fact that many corporate media articles today focus on pointing out to the rubes how their senses are wrong and, gosh golly, everything is just peachy, it did not shock me to learn that Mr. Arends was not referring to the program’s unfunded liabilities or the projected depletion of the trust fund. No, Mr. Arends contends that the real problem is the dragooned citizens who foolishly worry about Social Security’s solvency—and the “quiet effort” to rabble-rouse:
The scariest number may be 71%. That astonishing figure, from a new poll, is how many have been persuaded that cuts to Social Security—potentially deep cuts—are either

2023-11-08

Europe currently faces several challenges that potentially harm the quality of life for people in general but especially for young individuals, preventing them from developing their lives autonomously and independently. The housing crisis, reflected in overcrowded accommodation affecting 28 percent of young people aged 15 to 29, is just one example.
Freedom of expression in Europe also seems more threatened than ever. Highly controlled content is removed from social platforms by those who seem to consider themselves more legitimate thinkers than the rest of us.
Young people in Europe appear to lack the freedom to grow as individuals with full freedom of expression and to even acquire property. However, there is a global phenomenon that seems more concerning and strangely urgent in the

2023-11-07

Financial statements of the US Federal Reserve, which consists of the board of governors in Washington and twelve district reserve banks across the country, indicate that the consolidated system has generated both capital and operating losses for the past couple of years. The Fed was created in 1913 to issue and circulate an “elastic currency” that could respond to consumers’ demand for cash, end bank runs known then as “money panics,” and serve as a “lender of last resort” to the nation’s commercial banks. How is it possible that the Fed could be losing money after one hundred years of operation?
The debate has raged in the banking and finance communities. Two investigators, Paul Kupiec at the American Enterprise Institute and Alex Pollock at the Mises Institute, have analyzed Fed