In a recent column, Paul Craig Roberts wrote that tariffs not only made international trade possible, but that they were merely a tax on consumption and were neutral elsewhere—and should be much-preferred to income taxes. He wrote:Trump sees tariffs in a different way than indoctrinated free-market economists. Tariffs don’t prevent trade. They ensure that countries have something with which to trade. Moreover, tariffs are a tax on consumption, not a tax on factors of production such as labor and capital. And as I emphasize, tariffs in place of income tax eliminates the resurrection of a form of slavery established in 1913 when government was given partial ownership of the labor of every working citizen.In another column, Roberts stated:A tariff is a tax on consumption, the preferable means

Once upon a time, in a land known as Washington, DC, the experts wisely governed the people, and the people were happy. Everything from the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the Internal Revenue Service was run with precision and, most of all, trust. The happy people trusted the experts to always do the right thing which they did.But one day, all of that changed for the worse when the Bad People came to this happy land and turned everything upside down for no good reason than just to be mean and bad. Declares Brooke Harrington of Dartmouth College in the New York Times:In the weeks since President Trump unleashed Elon Musk’s initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, on our federal institutions, it has profoundly destabilized basic systems we count on to make our society

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would be turning things upside down, and he has kept his promises. All one has to do is to read the latest edition of the New York Times to see how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is responding: rage, rage, and more rage, as the following editorial declares:President Trump’s determination to bend the American justice system to his will, combined with his broad tolerance for political corruption and his abhorrence of checks and balances on his power, slammed hard last week into the commitment to duty, honor and the rule of law shared by a group of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Washington, D.C. The confrontation between Mr. Trump’s lieutenants at the Justice Department — led by his former

The editors of the New York Times still are in shock. Less than eight months ago, the newspaper’s editorial board triumphantly published an editorial entitled, “Donald Trump, Felon.” Despite the fact that New York City’s district attorney Alvin Bragg was relying on untested legal theories, and despite the fact that the trial itself resembled a tag team effort between the prosecutor and Judge Juan Merchan—a partisan Democrat—the NYT solemnly assured its readers that everything was fair and honorable:In a humble courtroom in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, a former president and current Republican standard-bearer was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The jury’s decision, and the facts presented at the trial, offer yet another reminder — perhaps the starkest to date —

The 2024-25 basketball season is underway with the National Basketball Association and college men’s and women’s ball nearly a month into the Road to March Madness. One season, however, finished nearly three months ago: the Women’s National Basketball Association.In the 28 seasons it has been in existence, the WNBA always has operated in the basketball off-season during the late spring, summer, and early fall months when the emphasis is on Major League Baseball and the beginning of football season. Not surprisingly, the WNBA has been a sports afterthought, with sparsely-attended games and a less-than-dynamic style of play. It is partially owned by the NBA, which subsidizes some of the multi-million-dollar losses that have accompanied every WNBA season.This past year brought a huge change

After spending 25 years as a columnist for the New York Times, Paul Krugman is finally retiring from that position—25 years too late, if one wishes to be honest. It is hard to measure the influence he had from that perch, but his columns surely were the deciding factor in his winning the Nobel in economics in 2008 after eight years of lambasting the George W. Bush administration.(His Nobel Prize was given, ostensibly, for “his work in economic geography and in identifying international trade patterns,” but one should have no doubt that, without having the power and influence of the New York Times behind him, it is doubtful that the Nobel Committee would even have known of his existence. I weighed in on the Nobel selection in a column in Forbes, hastily-written during a short break between

When reality hit the Democratic Party and its ruling-class allies the day after the election, one Democrat must have been relieved: California governor Gavin Newsom. The Kamala Harris loss not only ends her political career—at least at the presidential level—but also clears the way for Newsom to pursue the White House himself.A Harris victory would have delayed Newsom’s quest for eight years, but now he can start laying the groundwork now for a run in 2028. Newsom will spend the next two years in office before becoming a full-time candidate, and, given the constitutional limit on two terms, the Republicans won’t have the advantage (or the weight) of incumbency and will likely present a candidate with less name recognition than Newsom possesses.The New York Times already has jumped in

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

One of the hot topics of the 2024 presidential election is the use of what Republicans have called “lawfare” by the Democrats, using the law—and especially criminal law—to go after political opponents by using the system to charge them with questionable crimes. I myself have denounced it here and here.There is no way to justify this use of criminal law except to say that it is a tool by political and economic elites to accomplish the same thing as Third World dictators have done, but do so using high-minded terms like “rule of law” and “fairness” as a cover for the use of naked political power. Furthermore, the elites have accepted it as a legitimate way to further their own power.With all the references to lawfare, one would think it was a relatively new thing; it is not. In fact,

In a much younger life, I was a newspaper reporter. A journalism-school graduate, I was going to help change the world, proclaiming truth and justice under my byline. The job didn’t pay much, but with overtime we got by, and it was a heady experience for this young general assignment reporter to rub shoulders with politicians and celebrities and even have some of them return his phone calls.Later in life, I had a long academic career in economics. I came to understand the mentality that has affected modern journalism for more than a century, and I believe that what we have seen in the past 25 years is the inevitable result of what happens when progressivism takes over.Twenty years ago, I wrote in a Mises Wire piece that modern media was a Progressive-era relic that was imploding, and that

As anyone who is conscious knows by now, the Joe Biden re-election campaign is in serious trouble. The president clearly showed signs of serious mental deterioration in his recent debate with Donald Trump and Biden’s performance was bad enough for even the New York Times (which had claimed up to the debate that Biden’s cognitive skills were fine, and anything said to the contrary was a lie) to call for him to drop out of the race.Biden, not surprisingly, has been defiant in the face of Democrats calling for him to step down, but that has not stopped the calls for a change and are looking to the party leaders to do something. Indeed, a number of prominent Democrats have called for everything from an “open convention” to a “mini-primary” in which the voters would help choose the Democrats’

A Manhattan jury’s decision to convict Donald Trump of falsifying business records to break federal election law is being heralded by The Usual Suspects as a moment in which “no one is above the law.” Indeed, both prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who brought the charges, and Judge Juan Merchan, who acted as a member of the prosecution, have proven that they themselves are above the law and can act well outside legal boundaries because no one will set boundaries for them.Beyond the hoopla and celebration by Democrats for this “victory” over their hated adversary, one suspects that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the verdict even after the appeals court and supreme court of New York State will surely uphold it. Should that happen – and I predict it will – then we will be treated to more

President Joe Biden is outraged. It seems that women’s basketball star Caitlin Clark, who played for the University of Iowa, does not have a rookie Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) that a typical NBA (for the men) top draft pick would have. He declared on his official X (formerly Twitter) account:Women in sports continue to push new boundaries and inspire us all. But right now we’re seeing that even if you’re the best, women are not paid their fair share. It’s time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons and ensure women are paid what they deserve.As anyone who has read the sports pages lately can attest, Clark’s WNBA rookie salary is $76,000, while the NBA’s top rookie draft choice, Victor Wembanyama was making about $12 million. Thus, Biden’s

In convicting James Crumbley of involuntary manslaughter yesterday, a Michigan jury’s verdict was “groundbreaking,” according to CNN. While the term was meant to describe a “new direction” in the application of criminal law, perhaps it is more appropriate to think of the jury’s actions as breaking ground in an attempt to bury what is left of the criminal law this country inherited from England.That is not a good thing. For all the faults in the application of US criminal law, the courts have recognized the boundaries that the law and those engaged in prosecution of alleged crimes must have to keep the system from turning into little more than show trials. If the verdicts against Crumbley and his wife are permitted to stand, then the courts will be endorsing criminal convictions against

A Michigan jury this past week convicted Jennifer Crumbley of “involuntary manslaughter” after her then-fifteen-year-old son Ethan shot and killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School in 2021, using a gun that his parents had given to him as a present. Ethan had suffered from depression and other mental health issues before his deadly actions, and hindsight obviously tells us that he should not have been given a gun in the first place, but the issues this trial and verdict create go well beyond any discussion of parenting.
Most media accounts of the verdict concentrate on the shooting itself, Jennifer Crumbley’s actions or inactions, and the reactions of the jurors and one of the parents whose daughter Ethan had gunned down. None asks a more important question: Did Jennifer

The recent campus protests following the Hamas-Israel conflict have been framed as either antiapartheid or anti-Semitic. The conflict is much deeper, being rooted in toxic identity politics.
Original Article: The Anti-Semitism Controversy on College Campuses Is the Direct Result of Identity Politics

On Monday night, January 8, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington football teams will vie for the collegiate national championship. While championships always bring excitement to fans and participants alike, this year’s game brings attention to major changes that have occurred in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I in the past few years involving both monetary payments and mobility for athletes.
While there is excitement for the game, we are seeing undercurrents that some claim will “destroy college football” as we have known it. The major changes involve athletes being able to gain product endorsements or make money off their likeness (Name, Image, and Likeness, or NIL) as well as being able to transfer one time via the NCAA Transfer Portal with

Anyone following the news knows that after a bruising congressional hearing on antisemitism on elite college campuses knows that Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, recently lost their jobs. while the president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is under fire. While the issue is being framed as these presidents permitting (and sometimes encouraging) antisemitism on campus, the real issue is much deeper than just animus against Jewish students and firing a few presidents will not change the atmosphere.
Ever since Hamas guerrillas attacked an outdoor music festival and a nearby Israeli kibbutz, gunning down unarmed people, committing gang rapes, and taking hostages back to Gaza, college campuses have been roiled

In 1982, I had the privilege of touring East Berlin with Murray Rothbard and other delegates from the Mont Pelerin Society. At the time, the Western press heaped praise on East Germany for what progressives believed to be the many accomplishments of communism’s most celebrated regime.
Unlike the more capitalistic West Berlin, East Berlin had an administered socialist economy complete with free healthcare. East Germany was proof that socialism could not only build things like an allegedly functioning economy, but also rebuild the Alexanderplatz. This was proof, according to National Geographic, that the communists “had arrived.”
We saw the Alexanderplatz on our city tour, which was a pretty typical Eastern Bloc exercise in sterile architecture. We also saw apartment buildings whose

In an October column, Paul Krugman admonished people who are not all in on the Joe Biden economy and declared that we are headed at worst for a “soft landing” in which an economic slowdown—if it happens at all—will be short and shallow. He wrote:
The most important reason for optimism is that an ever-widening range of indicators suggests that the conventional wisdom—that we needed a recession to bring inflation under control—was wrong. Instead, we seem close to returning to the Federal Reserve’s inflation target without paying much of a price at all. (emphasis mine)
Two months earlier, Krugman’s employer, the New York Times, ran a disturbing piece entitled, “America Is Using Up Its Groundwater like There’s No Tomorrow,” in which the Times chronicled how urban and agricultural interests are

A number of Christian conservatives are claiming that markets are as coercive as government. Try boycotting the FBI or your local police the next time they do something outrageous.
Original Article: "Are Markets Tyrannical? Where Christian Conservatives Are Mistaken"

Christian conservatives, for the most part, are relatively receptive to free markets, or at least a generalized concept of what used to be called free enterprise. (This is as opposed to a lot of evangelical economists teaching at Christian colleges that embrace socialism in one form or another as THE Christian version of economics.)
World Magazine has been on the relatively conservative side of political affairs, or at least enough so to be scorned by faculty members of more progressives Christian colleges, but it also has the tendency to give into the conservative notion that free market economies need to be regulated for both legal and cultural reasons. In a recent edition, Brad Littlejohn warned Christians to beware of the “tyranny” of free markets, claiming that markets are as

New York Times columnist David French likes to think of himself as an honest broker. In reality, his "Never Trump" mentality leads him to overlook government lawbreaking.

Original Article: "David French Gets to Sit with the Cool Kids at the NYT Lunch Table"

Most of us would like to forget many of the unpleasant aspects of our adolescence, and especially our days in middle and high school. No matter what the school setting, private or public, every place had its “cool kids” who ruled over the rest of us, especially in the school cafeteria.
Journalism has its own version of the “cool kids,” those being reporters and writers from larger media outlets such as the New York Times (NYT) or from network news. In the past few years, I have watched journalist David French as he has maneuvered from National Review to his recent new perch as a regular columnist on the op-ed page of the New York Times, a position he has called his “dream job.” Despite the protestations of some NYT staffers and LGBTQIA+ activists over his hiring, French is proving to be a

The Biden administration has decided that the REAL problem with housing is that the wrong people are saving money and making timely mortgage payments. They must be punished.

Original Article: "Biden’s New Intersectionality: Where Equity Policies Meet Bad Economics"

Every day, more and more Americans are awakening to the reality that the institutions in control of this nation are failing them. From violence in the streets, inflation in our stores, increasing tyranny and censorship, and absolute buffoonery on public display in halls of political power. The ruling class is getting richer while most of us suffer, and new generations are becoming increasingly warped by the dangerous ideologies of the left.
Recorded at The Depot Craft Brewery & Distillery in Reno, Nevada on May 20th, 2023.

In the summer of 2020, the Smithsonian Institution created a chart meant to condemn what it calls “whiteness,” and it listed a number of characteristics it claimed were essential to “white culture.” Among the so-called characteristics it described in pejorative terms was delaying gratification, or saving for the future, what Austrian economists would call low time preference.
The chart, which was withdrawn after widespread protest, sought to identify the characteristics needed to build not only an economy but civilization itself with a racist culture. Thus, the kind of lifestyle and values that might culminate in someone having high credit scores and saving up for a significant down payment for a house were something not to be emulated or praised, but rather to be called out and declared

Washington elites and especially their media have denounced what they once praised: leaking of official documents that show the government has been lying.

Original Article: "Arbitrary Use of Power: Punishing Those Who Expose Not-So-Secret Government Secrets"

Democratic politicians and supporters are cheering the Trump indictment, but the entire process has been so politicized that its legitimacy is easily called into question.

Original Article: "With the Trump Indictment, America Is a Step Closer to Being a Banana Republic"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Most readers might not remember Daniel Ellsburg, but for those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War, the maelstrom that formed around him and his actions helped to define that era. Ellsburg, of course, is famous because he leaked a number of internal government documents called the Pentagon Papers in which the writers expressed skepticism about the chances for U.S. success in the Vietnam War.
Ellsburg chose to leak to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which at that time (as well as today) were the print voices of the political and academic elites. By 1971, when the papers printed some of the documents (after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to allow publication), the war was well out of favor with the Democratic Party – whose politicians had started the war in the first

When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office
…were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses. . .. Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn’t been charged as crimes before. . . . We’re looking to find the next areas of conduct that meets any sort of statutory definition of what criminal conduct is.
At that time, federal prosecutors were going after people like investment banker Michael Milken, but even they would have stopped at indicting a former president. That day is gone, however, and

As the financial ripples following the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) continue to run through the financial sector, a predictable voice has weighed in on the affair, and, as always, giving bad advice. Elizabeth Warren, never one to skip a chance to publicly gnaw on a financial carcass, writes in the New York Times that the entire problem is lack of government regulation. Of course.
The US senator from Massachusetts has spent most of her Washington career calling for both easy money and a financial sector that will “serve the little guy” and be the paragon of fiscal responsibility at the same time. Her demands are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to be the voice of financial reason from the left. She writes in the Times:
No one should be mistaken about

Neo-Calvinist economic thought claims that prices and private property cause scarcity. However, they provide no methodology for their claims.

Original Article: "Making Nonsense from Sense: Debunking Neo-Calvinist Economic Thought"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

A few years ago I wrote about some of the errors made by economists who try to apply what they believe are Christian principles to both Austrian and neoclassical economic analysis. These economists believe that the standard economic way of thinking is not only fatally flawed but actually immoral, and that an entire new paradigm must be brought to economics.
In the mid-1990s, I taught economics as an adjunct at a Christian college near Chattanooga, being essentially the entire department. For the most part, it was a good experience, and the students were attentive and talented. However, in the spring of 1995, I was asked to teach a course (along with other faculty members) from a neo-Calvinist perspective, which meant presenting a very different view of economics using a neo-Calvinist book,

Economists and pundits mistakenly call the Federal Reserve System’s security holdings a portfolio. It is anything but.

Original Article: "The Fed’s Portfolio Is Nonexistent: The Fed Does Not Invest. It Destroys Investments"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Every so often, I check my investment portfolio to see how it is doing. (I stay out of stocks these days, but that is due to my personal situation and is not to be taken as investment advice.) Portfolios are collections of various financial instruments that one is holding, and one always hopes that their value will head in the right direction over time.

Much is made of the failure of Republicans to make predicted gains in the recent midterm elections, but, as Ryan McMaken has pointed out, Congress plays a much-diminished role in national governance to the point that even had the so-called Red Wave actually occurred, it is doubtful that much would have changed regarding Joe Biden’s presidency.

After months of being portrayed as a villain or worse in the mainstream media, Joe Manchin suddenly has become a Democratic Party hero—all because he has declared he will support legislation that he and President Joe Biden claim will “reduce inflation” and give us better weather.

If there is a mantra among progressive American political and media elites, it would be “our democracy,” usually preceded by what they believe to be a threat from the Right. For example, progressives deemed the recent reversal of Roe “a threat to our democracy” because it removed laws regulating abortion from Supreme Court jurisdiction and returned the issue to democratically elected legislatures.

When the Bourbon dynasty was restored to power in France in the early 1800s after Napoleon’s abdication, the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand famously said of that family: "They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing." In modern economic parlance, one can say the same thing about progressives, who once again are demanding price controls to "fight inflation."

Politicians love their buzzwords and talking points, and the Joe Biden White House and the Democratic Party use them as much or more than when Donald Trump and the Republicans ran Washington’s freak show. Last year, the mantra from the Biden administration was that inflation was “transitory,” meaning that the inflation would not last long.

When Ronald Reagan officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States in November 1979, he called for the establishment of a large free trade zone encompassing the USA, Canada, and Mexico.

According to the Marxists and their fellow travelers, inflation is good because it transfers wealth from creditors to debtors, and debtors are "the 99 percent." But inflation doesn’t work that way.  

With the recent rise in inflation—with subsequent increases in both consumer and producer price levels—one suspects that sooner or later people on the left either would downplay it or find a way to spin the bad news into something positive like an alchemist would want to spin straw into gold. Both accounts have arrived, thanks to the New York Times and the hard-left publication, The Intercept.

When David Card was recently awarded the Nobel Memorial Price in Economic Science (along with two other economists), I figured Paul Krugman would weight in, since Card, along with the late Alan Krueger, authored an economic study almost thirty years ago that allegedly debunked standard economic theory on the effects of a binding minimum wage. Krugman did not disappoint.

That Austrians and Keynesians do not share many views on economics (or probably anything else) is obvious, so a difference of opinion between the two hardly should surprise anyone.

Paul Krugman has a very prominent perch from the editorial page at the New York Times and he has used his influence, among other things, to shill for two things that are anathema to a strong economy: inflation and organized labor. My analysis examines what Krugman says about labor unions and explains why once again his economic prognostications are off base.

Given the overt hostility that progressives have toward private enterprise in the first place, politicians will take shutdown-caused shortages and empty shelves as “proof” that private enterprise has failed.

In the first presidential “debate” (I use that word creatively), Joe Biden hinted that he would order a national lockdown in order to “defeat” the covid-19 virus, and there certainly seems to be a consensus in the media and among political elites that if there is another “outbreak” of covid, then the “shelter in place” order will be the law of the land.

Presidential campaigns in the United States tend to be discouraging affairs, even if one is not a libertarian who has zero expectations that anything good can come from American elections. The old saw that insanity consists of doing the same thing repeatedly and somehow expecting different results applies to presidential campaigns as well as to anything else.

Let me tell you about Keynesian economists. They are different from you and me. They learn their mathematical models and aggregate terminology early and easily, and it does something to them, makes them proud and self-omniscient where the rest of us are circumspect, in a way that, unless you were born a Keynesian economist, is very difficult to understand.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Princeton University has made it official: Woodrow Wilson’s name no longer will have any place on campus. The former president, or at least his memory, now is part of cancel culture, which is sweeping the nation. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs will replace the former president’s name with “Princeton,” and Wilson College now will be called First College.

When US attorney general William Barr recently announced that the Department of Justice was reversing course and dropping all charges against former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, the response from Democrats, the mainstream news media, and Never-Trump Republicans such as David French was thermonuclear, to put it mildly.

It has been a long time since I read anything by Paul Krugman, and seeing his most recent column simply reminds me why I’ve not missed anything. As both an extreme Keynesian and political partisan, he long ago abandoned economic analysis for something economists should recognize as nothing less than what Mises called metaphysics.