Website powered by Mises Institute donors
Mises Institute is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions are tax-deductible to the full extent the law allows. Tax ID# 52-1263436
Full story here Are you the author?You Might Also Like
2024-02-22
Milton Friedman: The Last ConservativeBy Jennifer BurnsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023; x + 587 pp.
Imagine that you come across this about the “education premium” on someone’s blog: “By going to college, you are more than tripling your chances for success in after life.” The statement is buttressed by a calculation of the extra lifetime earnings that a college degree will provide. Wouldn’t you think that the author is an economist? In fact, the author was a high school student, and he wrote this in 1927, before ever studying economics. As you will by now have guessed, the precocious student was Milton Friedman.
Jennifer Burns, a professor of history at Stanford, makes clear in her outstanding biography that many of Friedman’s characteristic intellectual traits were present at a very
2024-02-20
Most public-school graduates have heard that Thomas Paine wrote something that convinced the colonies to declare their independence—though if they’re older than twenty-one their memory probably needs jogging. A few can even name what he wrote: Common Sense. And some can even incorrectly attribute a famous line to that pamphlet: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
With rare exceptions, most people don’t give a whit about Paine or what he wrote. But then, most people don’t care much for American history. What they don’t care about they don’t know about, as Mark Dice has ably demonstrated. Only if something is posted on social media does it count, and probably not for long. Whatever causal effects the days of 1776 might have had, they’re long buried in the great turmoil of events that
2023-11-21
On Sunday, Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina by a comfortable margin, with 56 percent of the vote. He will be sworn in as president on December 10.
Over the past year, however, Milei has made a name for himself as an extremely vocal critic of socialism, central banks, and many types of government intervention in general. He has become memorable for fiery commentary condemning the Left’s ideology and tactics while expressing an interest in immediate (i.e., not gradualist) change. He has said he seeks to abolish Argentina’s central bank and introduce the US dollar as the country’s dominant currency.
His fiscal policy is far more in the free-market direction than any other head of state in a country as large as Argentina (with 46 million residents). Milei has expressed
2023-11-16
Many economists, including Milton Friedman, have claimed that reality is elusive and that one cannot know its true nature. Most mainstream economists also believe that data gives us the state of the economy. By inspecting numbers such as gross domestic product (GDP) or the consumer price index, only then can an economist accurately assess the state of economic conditions.
Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics have had a different view. According to Mises, the data is a historical display and, by itself, cannot provide the facts regarding the real world. To make sense of the data, one needs to have a theory beforehand that will allow one to interpret the data, and the theory must originate from something real that cannot be refuted. A theory resting on the foundation that
2023-11-15
Americans live in a complex world. That has made those who argue for ever-growing statism to often claim that “the more complex the society, the more government control we need.” One major reason is that this claim allows them to assert that even if liberty was appropriate in a long-past, simple “horse and buggy” age (as when America began as a country), it cannot possibly be so now.
When I hear such an assertion, the first thing I think of is whether the world we face today really is more complex for us than in the distant past. Regarding how much technology is in use, the world is clearly more complex. However, with regard to how many different skills and abilities someone in that distant past needed to survive, I am not so sure. A single person in the past might have to build their own
Tags: Featured,newsletter