Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org
Sharekh Shaikh On The Digital Revolution In Market Research
Market research is a tool for gathering data about customers and consumers that businesses hope will lead to insights about their behaviors and preferences that can be translated into innovation, better service and better business performance. As with any dynamic system, it has changed over time, and the effects of entropy have begun to show themselves in invalid techniques, invalid data, and invalid conclusions. And as with virtually all business...
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Politics Is Turning Us into Idiots
From race to gender to nearly everything else, decisions about what is correct or incorrect are made according to politics. This is a recipe for social destruction.
Original Article: "Politics Is Turning Us into Idiots"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Who Are the Wealth Destroyers, Politicians or Billionaires?
Thinking that billionaires are a policy failure has become pervasive in the United States. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren are leading the charge in the demonization of billionaires. Left-leaning politicians and their allies think that billionaires corrode society by accumulating large fortunes, which amplify inequality. As such, many propose taxation as a tool to promote fairness by redistributing resources, yet such...
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The Fed’s Capital Goes Negative
The Federal Reserve’s new report of its balance sheet shows that in the approximately six months ended March 29 it has racked up a remarkable $44 billion of cumulative operating losses. That exceeds its capital of $42 billion, so the capital of the Federal Reserve System has gone negative to the tune of $2 billion—just in time for April Fools’ Day.
This event would certainly have surprised generations of Fed chairmen, governors, and, we’d have...
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To Fight the State, Build Alternatives to the State
The challenge at hand is more than simply opposing the state. Rather, it is necessary to build up, reinforce, and sustain institutions that can offer alternatives to the state.
Original Article: "To Fight the State, Build Alternatives to the State"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Why the Regime Needs the Dollar to Be the Global Reserve Currency
Last week, Fox News aired a segment discussing the possibility that the US dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency and what that would mean for Americans. The tone of the piece suggested that a “catastrophic” decline of the US dollar was not only possible, but perhaps even imminent. CNN last week also aired its own segment suggesting the US will face “a reckoning like none before” if the “dollar’s dominance” in the global economy falls...
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What Our Energy Future Be? A Few Ideas
Access to energy has long been taken for granted as society became quite used to relatively stable prices and the ample abundance of energy. Meanwhile, the business side of energy was relegated to industry insiders, policymakers, and market traders dealing with the matter as a profession. However, the perceptible rise in prices and the fear of supply shortages have pushed energy considerations to the forefront of societal consciousness.
This crunch...
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Is the Fed Trying to Bail Out the World? Sure Looks Like It
Like the arsonist who then heroically fights the fire he set, the Fed is increasing its efforts to bail out banks both at home and abroad. This does not end well.
Original Article: "Is the Fed Trying to Bail Out the World? Sure Looks Like It"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Cancel Culture: The Digital Panopticon
The panopticon is a hypothetical surveillance and control system first imagined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. It’s envisioned as a tool to control the behavior of a large number of people with as little effort as possible. Here is one description: “The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see...
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SVB’s Failure Is Not an Excuse for More Regulation
Recently, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a bank that was heavily involved in cryptocurrency, collapsed. Naturally, Democrats want to exploit the situation to rush through new regulations. But that will only make the problem worse.
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank, a forty-year old, $200 billion bank, has caused many to worry about the country’s economic stability. Among the concerned is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who wants to reinstate some of the...
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Peasants, Rise Up! The Croquants of the 17th Century
Seventeenth-century French kings and their minions did not impose an accelerating burden of absolutism without provoking grave, deep, and continuing opposition. Indeed, there were repeated rebellions by groups of peasants and nobles in France from the 1630s to the 1670s. Generally, the focus of discontent and uprising was rising taxes, as well as the losses of rights and privileges. There were also similar rebellions in Spain in mid-century, and in...
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Why Most of the World Isn’t on Board with the NATO-Russia War
Many governments support continuing the Ukraine war, but ordinary people in Europe, America, and the developing world fear the war will bring economic disaster.
Original Article: "Why Most of the World Isn't on Board with the NATO-Russia War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Canada’s Impotent Justice System Is the Product of Dysfunctional Canadian Democracy
Conservatives have been pressuring “the Liberal government to address what they term a violent crime wave, citing the killings of five police officers in five months and a surge of violence in cities across Canada.” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said that violent crime is up 32 percent, gang killings are up 92 percent, and “Police tell us that often they have to arrest the same people multiple times in the very same day because they are...
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Bipartisanship Is Not a Substitute for Voluntary Exchange
Politicians tout "bipartisanship"—that often just means one's pocket will be picked even more cleanly.
Original Article: "Bipartisanship Is Not a Substitute for Voluntary Exchange"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Would Stress Tests Have Prevented the Failure of SVB? Probably Not
“This is all about regulation and the fact that at some point in time there was great advocacy for making sure that the regional banks and the smaller banks didn't have to comply with some of the rules that perhaps would not have allowed them to get into this situation because there would've been stress testing and more oversight and more watching of what was going on.”
~ Rep. Maxine Waters (D), Financial Services Committee, March 15, 2023
As fate...
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Why Fractional Reserve Banking Is behind Bank Failures
Suppose an addict had the ability to magically create, ex nihilo, his own stimulating drug, as fractional reserve banks can do with money and credit. Would you expect moderation?
Original Article: "Why Fractional Reserve Banking Is behind Bank Failures"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Climate Activism: The Second Children’s Crusade
The "first" Children's Crusade of 1212 ended in tragedy for those taking part. The "second" crusade is not going to produce any happy endings, either.
Original Article: "Climate Activism: The Second Children’s Crusade"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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The Price of Gold
Mark is not fooling around today. He looks back at the history of gold and its price, which some believe is too erratic and too unstable (like Bitcoin) to serve as a basis of a monetary system. Mark shows that it is not gold that destabilizes events in the real world, but rather real world events related to political decision-making that has made the price of gold unstable. The price of gold is a "minor" indicator of what governments are...
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With the Trump Indictment, America Is a Step Closer to Being a Banana Republic
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...
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Can Civilization Survive without Sound Money?
As long as states are around, money will never be sound. But first, some clarity.
Sound money, per Ludwig von Mises, has two aspects: It serves as a commonly accepted medium of exchange, while also making it difficult for governments to meddle with it. We can see immediately that sound money is nowhere to be found in today’s world. All the current rhetoric about banks and their systemic risks are about money that’s subject to political expediency,...
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