Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Social Media Should Not Be Blamed for the Consequences of Democracy

2024-02-07

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2024-02-07

Social media tends to be blamed for the overall nastiness of public discourse. Instead of condemning this form of communication, condemn the fuel that feeds this conflagration: democracy. Original Article: Social Media Should Not Be Blamed for the Consequences of Democracy

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Social Insecurity: It’s Not Wrong to be Concerned about Facts

2024-02-07

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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...

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Forget Being the World’s Policeman; the Federal Government Can’t Even Keep DC Safe

2024-02-07

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2024-02-07

As the US federal government works to “bring peace” to the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia, it faces a rather embarrassing problem. There is currently a historic wave of violent crime battering the residents of Washington, DC. With 274 homicides, 2023 was the deadliest year for the city since the 1990s. Shootings, carjackings, and armed robberies also jumped in the nation’s capital. Parts of DC have been unsafe for a long time, but the...

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Money-Supply Growth Has Stabilized as Stealth Liquidity Keeps Bubbles on Life Support

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

Money supply growth fell again in December, remaining deep in negative territory after turning negative in November 2022 for the first time in twenty-eight years. December's drop continues a steep downward trend from the unprecedented highs experienced during much of the past two years. Since April 2021, money supply growth has slowed quickly, and since late 2022, we've been seeing the money supply repeatedly contract, year over year. The last time...

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Understanding the Trump Phenomenon: It’s Not What the Elites Think

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

Donald Trump has won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and is leading in the polls to become the Republican candidate for the presidency in the upcoming general election. His status as the most likely contender to challenge Joe Biden is upsetting establishment figures who think that Trump’s ascent threatens democracy. Trump is constantly pilloried by the mainstream media as a demagogue who emboldens the racist underbelly of American...

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Affirmative Action, Jewish Quotas, and Academic Central Planning

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

Race-based affirmative action began with President John Kennedy's 1961 creation of a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (EEOC). Following that, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 that prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin by organizations that received federal contracts.  In what is considered the first legal...

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Jacobin Capitalism?

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

In his review of Claes G. Ryn's The Failure of American Conservatism, David Gordon points out that Austrian economic methodology is not a value-laden Jacobin experiment, but rather a workable explanation of how a successful economy works. Original Article: Jacobin Capitalism?

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Bye Bye Willie: The Political Rent-Seeker

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

Intellectual property laws provide another example of how government stifles innovation and competition. Original Article: Bye Bye Willie: The Political Rent-Seeker

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Bastiat versus MMT

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

One doesn’t need to search modern economic literature to take on the MMT crowd. Just read Bastiat. Original Article: Bastiat versus MMT

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Rising Interest Rates and the “Great Reset” Bubble

2024-02-06

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2024-02-06

While the “Great Reset” involves an unholy alliance between governments and big businesses, implementing its policies is impossible without central banks suppressing interest rates. Now that rates are rising, people are finding firsthand the real costs of the “Great Reset.” Original Article: Rising Interest Rates and the "Great Reset" Bubble

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Review: The Classical Liberal Case For Israel

2024-02-05

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2024-02-05

In War Guilt in the Middle East (1967) Murray Rothbard observes that libertarians are very clear on the principles of liberty, but less so on the details of specific events: Now this kind of insight into the root cause of war and aggression, and into the nature of the State itself, is all well and good … But the trouble is that the libertarian tends to stop there, and evading the responsibility of knowing what is going on in any specific war or...

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Studying Economic Data and Processing It Is Not “Doing Economics”

2024-02-05

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2024-02-05

Most mainstream economists believe the application of quantitative methods on historical data can explain the state of the economy. Others such as Ludwig von Mises held that the data utilized by economists is a historical display, which by itself cannot provide the facts of economics. Ludwig von Mises wrote, “Experience of economic history is always the experience of complex phenomena. It can never convey knowledge of the kind the experimenter...

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One of these Things Is Not Like the Others

2024-02-05

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2024-02-05

The government, federal or otherwise, has no business model because it is not a business. We know this at the outset because government does not compete in the market for people’s money, as every other business must do. With a monopoly of violence, it seizes the money it wants through taxes and monetary inflation. As long as the government doesn’t get carried away by taxing and inflating too much, most people—many of whom call themselves...

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Fiscal Rules Do Not Undermine Investment, But Government Profligacy Does

2024-02-03

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2024-02-03

To prevent public debt from soaring in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009, Germany has enshrined a “debt brake” in its constitution. The debt brake sets strict limits on federal public debt levels and restrains government borrowing. This fiscal rule has served its purpose, and public debt has been on a downward path, dropping by about 15 percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP) since its introduction. Yet the government...

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Tightwads at the Fed

2024-02-03

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2024-02-03

Mark talks about the Fed's Reverse Repo Operations, which explain the conundrum of the Fed's "tight" monetary policy and new record highs in the stock market. It turns out that the Fed is not a bunch of "tightwads" after all, but has served up a nearly $2 trillion monetary injection since the bond market cratered last year. Be sure to follow Minor Issues at Mises.org/MinorIssues. Get your free copy of Dr. Guido...

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A Short History of the Right to Self-Determination

2024-02-03

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2024-02-03

In his 1927 book Liberalism, the radical classical liberal and economist Ludwig von Mises took a strict and expansive view in favor of secession. Specifically, he noted that respect for the right of self-determination required extant states to allow the separation of new polities seeking secession. He writes: The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular...

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How Carl Menger and the Austrians Helped to Steer Economic Theory in the Right Direction

2024-02-03

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2024-02-03

Adam Smith, in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, stipulates the guiding principles of classical economic orthodoxy, establishing guiding principles that will guide the English economic paradigm. Despite a tradition more focused on Colbertism (between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and physiocracy (from the eighteenth century onwards), classical economics managed to penetrate this French academic environment due to names such as...

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We Like Ike! Joe Salerno on Rolling Back the Ideology of Inflation

2024-02-02

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2024-02-02

Academic VP of the Mises Institute, Joe Salerno, joins Bob to discuss his talk at the Supporters Summit, centering on the mainstream's focus on "rules vs. discretion" in monetary policy. Salerno explains how President Eisenhower's administration marked a pivot away from the ideology of inflation. Dr. Salerno's Talk at the 2023 Supporters Summit: Mises.org/HAP433a   Join Tom DiLorenzo, Joe Salerno, and Patrick Newman in Tampa on February...

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Serbia’s Two Traditions of Freedom

2024-02-02

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2024-02-02

Today, Serbia does not enjoy a reputation as a free country. The philosophy of strong hand, top-down organization of society, a socialist understanding of economy, and fierce nationalism are its trademarks. The legacy of socialism with a human face, of which I have written elsewhere, has entrenched a statist mentality among the population and has shaped the understanding of economics among the political and intellectual elite. But it is little...

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Does Socialism Protect Rights or Violate Them?

2024-02-02

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2024-02-02

In last week’s column, I discussed Scott Sehon’s new book, Socialism: A Logical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024), and this week, I’d like to continue the analysis of the book, focusing on Sehon’s discussion of rights under socialism. The main topic we need to look at is whether socialism violates important rights that people ought to be accorded in a just political and social system. Before addressing this topic, though, we need to look...

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