Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

Past Tense

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 Classical Economists’ Theory of Value Was More Sophisticated than You Think

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 »

Personnel is Policy for Kamala Harris

As the saying goes, “Personnel is Policy.” President Trump learned this the hard way, depending heavily on the very Washington, D.C. swamp creatures whose swamp he sought to drain. George W. Bush, having scant foreign policy experience himself, leaned heavily on a stable of neoconservative advisors, who had long pressed for another war with Iraq. What might a Kamala Harris victory in November portend for US foreign policy? Harris’s statements and...

Read More »

Thousands of Years Later, Price Controls Are Still a Bad Idea

In 301 AD, Roman emperor Diocletian implemented price ceilings on over 1,200 goods. The silver coinage had been debased over the past 250 years, and the citizens were understandably unhappy about high prices. In 50 AD, each denarius had about 3.9 grams of silver, but then the empire debased the coins, sometimes in dramatic steps and sometimes more slowly. By 125 AD, the coins had less than 3 grams of silver. By 200 AD, it was less than 2 grams....

Read More »

Democrats to Escalate Their War on the American Economy

Democrats didn’t even bother to wait for their 2024 National Convention in Chicago to appoint their replacement presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, and to tout the new economic planks to be added to the party’s platform. In her August 16th speech on the economy, she pledged her loyalty to the party’s current interventionist agenda, professing that the Biden regime’s policies have supposedly been good for the middle class and that she will...

Read More »

Is There a Praxeological Ethics?

Praxeological Ethics: An Inquiry into the Nature and Foundation of Ethicsby J.W. Rich; (Independently published, 2024, 153)I met J.W. Rich when he was a student last month at Mises University, and he mentioned to me that he was working on a book about praxeological ethics. He has now sent me the book, and it is very impressive indeed. It is remarkable in its scope, and in what follows I’ll indicate some points of the many insightful points in the...

Read More »

When Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations and Rape Are De Facto Legal

The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity,” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in...

Read More »

Fewer Americans Are Willing to Fight and Die for Other Countries

A July poll shows that a majority of the American public does not support sending U.S. troops to defend Taiwan or Ukraine, sentiment that lines up with findings from other recent surveys on these heated subjects, which suggests that Americans appear to be warming to restraint and non-interventionism in international affairs.Indeed, another poll, conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in February found that a majority of Americans (56%)...

Read More »

Powell: More Easy Money Is Coming Soon

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference at the annual Jackson Hole economic conference today, and he all but said that a September cut to the federal funds rate is a done deal: “The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear.”Naturally he threw in the usual propaganda phrases about how the Fed is data driven. He continues: “the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and...

Read More »

Powell: More Easy Money Is Coming Soon

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 »

Adam Smith, the American Home, and the Religion of Progress

“Having to manage a complex home produces a deadweight loss to both society and the individual.” - John Tamny and Jack Ryan (2024)A man’s home is his castle, says the old adage, but John Tamny and Jack Ryan thumb their nose at the sacred “American Dream” of home ownership in their new book Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home.

Read More »

Be Prepared to Hear More about Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

No American politician running for office wants to talk about taxes—unless, of course, it’s to promise a tax cut. No Misesian views taxes with anything but suspicion, and Mises himself held some principled views on taxes: Taxes are necessary.

Read More »

The Problem with Trump’s Agenda 47 for Homeschoolers

Homeschooling has never been an experiment. Parents teaching their children the individual and unique things which they believe they should know has not only been the way of life before the public school experiment, but is the most libertarian way to address the total governmental failure and inefficient model of so-called education.

Read More »

Milei’s Monetary Conundrum

The monetary route in Argentina appears to be entering a new phase, and some form of currency competition was implied in the July 2024 statements of Minister of Economy Luis Caputo. The route is akin to a regime where transactions are legal in multiple currencies, but only the peso holds legal tender status.

Read More »

The Feds’ Runaway Deficits Are Here to Stay

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 High Cost of Kamala’s Price Controls

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.

Read More »

The Perpetual Struggle of Libertarian Candidates: Why They Face an Uphill Battle

The Libertarian Party was assembled in 1971 and has proven throughout its history to be a resoundingly-unsuccessful third-party venture in American politics. While libertarians are outspoken in their advocacy for individual liberties, limited government, and free markets, their presidential candidates have proven largely unsuccessful throughout history.

Read More »

The Feds’ Runaway Deficits Are Here to Stay

Watch the video version of this article on X/Twitter. The latest monthly report on taxes and spending from the Treasury Department shows that in July, the federal deficit was $244 billion, or nearly one quarter of a trillion dollars.In spite of the fact that the US government managed to collect $330 billion in taxes in July, they also managed to spend $574 billion.

Read More »

The New Minimum Wage Increase in Nigeria is a Pyrrhic Victory for Organized Labor

While organized labor across Nigeria is currently jubilant over their recent win in obtaining a minimum wage increase by fiat, every student of praxeology in Nigeria receives this news with mixed feelings and the utmost reservation, because we are cognizant of the outcomes which inevitably follow from such interventions in the free market.

Read More »

Greedflation and Debtflation are Nonsense

Popular discussions of inflation and the economy have produced more heat than light, if not heat and darkness. President Biden has made multiple remarks on his record, which taken singly are each incorrect. Taken together, Biden’s remarks on Bidenomics are incoherent.Biden claims that his main fiscal stimulus policy, the American Recovery Plan delivered record reductions in unemployment without causing inflation. Biden has insisted that corporate...

Read More »