Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Clarifying Scarcity: The Garden of Eden

2024-03-11

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2024-03-11

One of the first laws of economics—in fact, the condition that makes economics possible and necessary—is scarcity. On page one of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics.”While defining scarcity and its critical role in economics, I like to ask my students in a Christian school a question to tease this out: Would scarcity have existed in the Garden of Eden?

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The Folly of Rent Control in New York City (Again)

2024-03-11

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2024-03-11

One would guess the folly of rent control regulations needn’t be explained any further. If rents are held in place by government edict, landlords have no incentive to maintain apartment units to attract renters, the housing stock ultimately deteriorates, and homelessness increases.

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Separating Information from Disinformation: Threats from the AI Revolution

2024-03-11

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2024-03-11

Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot distinguish fact from fiction. It also isn’t creative or can create novel content but repeats, repackages, and reformulates what has already been said (but perhaps in new ways).I am sure someone will disagree with the latter, perhaps pointing to the fact that AI can clearly generate, for example, new songs and lyrics.

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Junk fees, Shrinkflation, Surge Pricing and Other Legal Price-setting Strategies: Price Controls by Another Name

2024-03-11

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2024-03-11

President Biden needs an economics lesson. Demonstrating his ignorance of economics, his recent State of the Union speech regaled us with a laundry list of legal business pricing strategies that he wants to see restricted or banned by federal agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). 

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Why American Foreign Policy Fails

2024-03-10

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2024-03-10

One thing to be said in favor of the American conservative establishment is the fact that they at least pay lip service to the idea of a free market. They have also memorized the typical talking points in its defense, including the greater prosperity it provides, the morality of private property, and the impossibility of successful central planning.

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Golden Opportunities Ahead

2024-03-09

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2024-03-09

In this week's episode, Mark looks at the opportunities ahead of us for significant reforms and dismantling the State. Increasingly, more people realize that the government has been lying to them and working against their interests. Many also realize that Austrian economists, in contrast with Mainstream economists, have been presenting the true picture of the State. The political landscape has already shifted—and continues to shift—beneath the...

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Free Trade

2024-03-09

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2024-03-09

In this week's episode, Mark examines Ludwig von Mises's important contributions to free trade theory. Free trade is more important than people think, and most government intervention is protectionist—or aids the promoters of protectionism.

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Free Markets and the Antidiscrimination Principle

2024-03-09

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2024-03-09

If we understand human rights as rights derived from the concept of self-ownership, it becomes clear that there is no such right as the right not to be discriminated against. I have a right to speak but no right to force others to listen to me or to “amplify” my voice. I am at liberty to go about my lawful business, but I have no right to force others to watch me or recognize me, much less to demand that anyone should take action to make me “feel...

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The Economics of the AI Revolution

2024-03-09

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2024-03-09

In a recent article, we briefly summarized what it is that we today call artificial intelligence (AI). Whereas these technologies are certainly impressive and may even pass the Turing test, they are not beings and have no consciousness.

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Grover Cleveland: The Last Good Democrat

2024-03-09

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2024-03-09

After the War to Prevent Southern Independence and the assassination of Lincoln the federal government was said to possess a "treasury of virtue." The Republican Party, which was the federal government, with a decades-long monopoly of power rivaled only by the Bolsheviks in Russia, made sure that the government-run schools would preach this Virtuous State Philosophy to generations of school children.And what did the Party of Virtue do with its...

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Not Altogether Honest Abe

2024-03-08

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2024-03-08

Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nationby Joshua ZeitzViking, 2023; 313 pp.Joshua Zeitz, a contributing writer to Politico, has written a very useful book. It belongs to an increasingly common genre: books that are very favorable to Abraham Lincoln, in some cases approaching a deification of him, which nevertheless present material that show Lincoln in a less-than-flattering light.

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Employment Falls for the Third Month In Spite of 50,000 New Government Jobs

2024-03-08

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2024-03-08

According to a new report from the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics this week, the US economy added 275,000 jobs for the month of February while the unemployment rate rose to 3.9%. In what has become a predictable ritual, reporters from the legacy media were sure to declare "another strong jobs report."

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Understanding the AI Revolution

2024-03-08

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2024-03-08

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is here, and it is bound to change the world as we know it—or so proclaims the hype following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT version 3.5 in November 2022, which was only the beginning. Indeed, much has happened since then with the release of the much-improved version 4.0, which was integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and the recent beta release of Google’s Gemini.

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Marxist Women’s Day

2024-03-08

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2024-03-08

In April 1845, Karl Marx’s mother-in-law sent to the Marx family a nanny named Helene Demuth, known as “Lenchen.” Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny, was thrilled. After all, she had long expressed the wish that Karl would “earn some capital rather than just writing about capital.”But Karl refused to earn money. Just as he refused soap and bathing, which spawned boils all over his body.

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The Absurdity and Danger of the State of the Union

2024-03-08

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2024-03-08

On Thursday night, tens of millions of Americans from across the political spectrum tuned in to see how President Joe Biden would perform in his third State of the Union Address. The president’s age and cognitive ability has become a top issue facing his re-election campaign. 

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The Great Depression and Great Depression II: Similarities, Differences

2024-03-08

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2024-03-08

Comparing Great Depression I with the current Great Depression II, the cause has been the same, and the responses have been similar.But it’s important to not take the parallels too far. The circumstances differ, so the impacts will differ.First, the similarities.Same Cause, Similar ResponsesBoth depressions, like recessions, originated with unsustainable booms.

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Global Debt Levels Are a Ticking Time Bomb

2024-03-07

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2024-03-07

The relentless increase in global debt is an enormous problem for the economy. Public deficits are neither reserves for the private sector nor a tool for growth. Bloated public debt is a burden on the economy, making productivity stall, raising taxes, and crowding out financing for the private sector.

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No, There Is Not a Perfect Open Border System between the States

2024-03-07

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2024-03-07

Jonathan Casey, in his opening remarks during a debate with Ryan McMaken on national divorce, criticized national divorce on the grounds that it throws away the open borders compact between the states.

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Help Us Give Scholarships for AERC!

2024-03-07

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2024-03-07

This month, we will host the Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC), one of our most important programs. We’ll have thirty-one students attending, and nineteen students will deliver papers of their own. How encouraging!

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Central Banks and Housing Finance

2024-03-07

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2024-03-07

Although manipulating housing finance is not among the Federal Reserve’s statutory objectives, the U.S. central bank has long been an essential factor in the behavior of mortgage markets, for better or worse, often for worse. 

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