Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

Filter archive by: Show All Show only Articles Show only Videos

Can You Understand the Fed’s Nearly $200 Billion in Losses?

2024-09-18

by

2024-09-18

Can you understand how it can be that the Federal Reserve, the world’s greatest and by far most important central bank, has now lost the astounding sum of $193 billion? If not, you are surely not alone. Since September 2022, the Fed has lost money every month. These unprecedented losses continue, and this fall they will in the aggregate pass $200 billion.The Fed has a powerful mystique, which it works hard at cultivating. It intensely wants to be...

Read More »

The Fed Hits the Panic Button and Slashes the Fed Funds Rate

2024-09-18

by

2024-09-18

The Federal Reserve’s FOMC slashed the target federal funds rate at its meeting this month, reducing the target rate by 50 basis points from 5.5 percent to 5.0 percent. This was the largest cut to the target rate since March of 2020 in the midst of the Covid Panic. This cut comes after fourteen months of the FOMC holding the target rate at 5.5 percent. In late 2022, the FOMC was forced to allow interest rates to rise in response to mounting price...

Read More »

The Second Trump Shooter Believed Exactly What the Establishment Media Wanted Him to Believe

2024-09-18

by

2024-09-18

On Sunday, for the second time this election cycle, a man was able to get close to Donald Trump with a rifle. The former president was golfing when Secret Service agents spotted a rifle barrel poking out of some bushes just off the course, near a hole Trump would soon play. Agents fired on the suspect, causing him to flee as Trump was rushed off the course. Shortly after, the man was apprehended by police.A scoped rifle, two backpacks, and a video...

Read More »

Price Inflation Is Not a “Global Phenomenon”

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

The Economics Policy Institute (EPI) has promoted a myth that recent price inflation is a “global phenomenon,” is not caused by domestic economic policies. An EPI study claims “that high [price] inflation in the U.S. has not been driven by any unique American policy—not the American Rescue Plan and other generous fiscal relief during the pandemic recession and recovery nor anything else U.S.-centric”. It doesn’t logically follow that something that...

Read More »

Why Interest Rates Are Not the Price of Money

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

According to mainstream economics, interest rates are the price of money, but the Austrian school says differently. To understand these conflicting ideas, we must understand what prices, money, and interest are.First of all, prices are exchange-ratios between goods and/or services. An apple might be exchanged for a pear or two bananas. In that case we can conclude that the price of an apple, at that moment, is either one pear or two bananas....

Read More »

We Need Medical Freedom

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

In a free society, people have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. If you want to take something that “orthodox” medicine says you shouldn’t, this decision should be up to you. If the government can ban “dangerous drugs,” why not dangerous ideas too? As the great Ludwig von Mises points out, “Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to...

Read More »

The Customers and Their Enemies

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

There is an attack on the customer by its anti-market enemies. These enemies dislike market economies and private property and wish to see these institutions destroyed. The enemies want to see a new “king” to the throne—one that dislikes the customer. These enemies want to install a “king” that does not care about what you want to consume, but what they want you to consume.Too often, the caricature of a customer is negative but, in reality, the...

Read More »

Where Will All the Money Go?

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

The Federal Reserve seems to have finally committed to, but has not yet begun its “rate cutting cycle” of lower interest rates, specifically the Federal Funds Rate, or policy rate.This lines up well with what I have been thinking and saying here and elsewhere; the Fed was not likely to cut rates until the fall of 2024 or later.My thinking or guessing was based on the notion that the Fed wanted to remain perceived as tough on inflation for as long...

Read More »

Milei Wants More Government Spending—For the Military, of Course

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

From day one of his presidency, it has been apparent that Argentina’s President Javier Milei wants the Argentinian regime to be a willing member of the US-NATO axis in international affairs. Milei has demonstrated this with a variety of overtures toward the State of Israel and by his repeated meetings with the dictator of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This all positions Burenos Aires as a reliable supplicant and friend of Washington. Or, as I...

Read More »

The Ruling Elites Create an Orwellian Reinterpretation of Human Rights

2024-09-17

by

2024-09-17

Ludwig von Mises depicts the aim of revolutionary socialism as: “to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.” One of the main strategies in liquidating a civilization involves dismantling its legal and philosophical foundations. This role is fulfilled by activists who embark upon “sabotage and revolution” by subverting the meaning of words: “The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting...

Read More »

Privatize Federal Lands

2024-09-16

by

2024-09-16

Land in its natural state is not owned by anyone, argued John Locke in Two Treatises of Government, but after land is transformed by an individual’s labor, that person earns a right to own the land and any improvements. In the mid-1800s, the U.S. government put Locke’s property-rights theory into practice with the Homestead Act.

Read More »

Understanding the Real Costs of Slavery: It’s Not Cheap labor

2024-09-16

by

2024-09-16

Slavery has existed throughout history in all places and cultures. It was not introduced by the political state yet, as with many things, slavery could not have had the scope or extent that it did in human history absent the coercive apparatus of the political state.

Read More »

Do Financial Markets Immediately Provide All Relevant Information?

2024-09-16

by

2024-09-16

It is widely held that financial asset markets always fully reflect all available and relevant information, and that adjustment to new information is virtually instantaneous. This way of thinking is also known as the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), and is closely linked with the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), which postulates that market participants are at least as good at price forecasting as is any model that a financial market...

Read More »

How Government Propped Up Slavery

2024-09-14

by

2024-09-14

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...

Read More »

Why Marx Was Wrong about Workers and Wages

2024-09-14

by

2024-09-14

One of the central tenets of Marxism is the labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially-necessary labor time required to produce it. In this framework, labor itself becomes a commodity—something that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. Marx argues that, under capitalism, workers are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists, who exploit them by paying wages that are less...

Read More »

The Rebellious Old Right

2024-09-14

by

2024-09-14

In The Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard asks “how many Americans realize that, not so long ago, the American right wing was almost the exact opposite of what we know today?” Describing the American Old Right, Tom Woods explains that:…the Old Right drew inspiration from the likes of H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, and featured such writers, thinkers, and journalists as Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Felix...

Read More »

Marxism as Sophism: A Critical Examination of Labor as a Commodity

2024-09-14

by

2024-09-14

One of the central tenets of Marxism is the labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially-necessary labor time required to produce it. In this framework, labor itself becomes a commodity—something that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. Marx argues that, under capitalism, workers are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists, who exploit them by paying wages that are less...

Read More »

Is the Skyscraper Curse Dead?

2024-09-14

by

2024-09-14

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...

Read More »

The Bolognese Jurists behind the Proto-Austrians of the Salamanca School

2024-09-13

by

2024-09-13

Bologna, a city in northern Italy, is considered by many scholars to be the oldest university city in the Western world. Its university—the Alma Mater Studiorum—dates back to the year 1088. From the very beginning, the University of Bologna specialized in the analysis of law, especially in the study of canon law (the set of laws and decrees concerning the clergy and religious matters). Bologna became the home of famous jurists who studied and...

Read More »

The Bolognese Jurists behind the Proto-Austrian Theories of the Salamanca School

2024-09-13

by

2024-09-13

Bologna, a city in northern Italy, is considered by many scholars to be the oldest university city in the Western world. Its university—the Alma Mater Studiorum—dates back to the year 1088. From the very beginning, the University of Bologna specialized in the analysis of law, especially in the study of canon law (the set of laws and decrees concerning the clergy and religious matters). Bologna became the home of famous jurists who studied and...

Read More »