Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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The United States Needs a Spending Chainsaw

2025-02-22

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2025-02-22

The latest figures published by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are staggering. $75 billion saved in two weeks. Some of the items they have slashed are astonishing, including payments to transgender musicals in Ireland, DEI in Serbia, or decolonization of curriculum vitae. This is a two-week result, so it should be applauded. However, there is a lot more that needs to be done.The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the...

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The Human Trend

2025-02-22

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2025-02-22

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...

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Just War and Lost Cause Mythology

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

Rothbardian libertarianism upholds liberty as an ethical and moral standard, and for this reason it is often criticized for being idealistic and utopian. Addressing this critique, Duncan Whitmore argues that the mere fact that we live in a statist society, in which all our liberties are under siege does not mean the fight for liberty is a lost cause. His point is that “the seeming remoteness of victory today does not mean that victory will never...

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Why the Bureaucracy Keeps Getting Bigger

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

[This article is adapted from “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States.”]Bureaucracy is necessarily hierarchical, first because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and secondly because bureaucracy grows by adding more subordinate layers. Since, lacking a market, there is no genuine test of “merit” in government’s service to consumers, in a rule-bound bureaucracy seniority is often blithely adopted as a proxy for merit. Increasing...

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Revisiting James Burnham

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

Neoconservatism was born out of former Trotskyites that became anti-Communists at the end of the Second World War. After the campus protests and student movements of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, their repulsion to the waving of the Little Red Books and protests at Ivy League schools shifted these New Deal Truman Democrats into the hands of the Republican Party. There, early neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz made the...

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Pete Hegseth Should Fire a Lot of High Ranking Military Officers

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

Politico reports today: A bipartisan group of House lawmakers wants answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid reports that President Donald Trump’s administration is gearing up to dismiss high-ranking military officers.“There are valid reasons to remove a General or Flag Officer, but there must be clear, transparent, and apolitical criteria and processes associated with any such dismissal,” Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Don Bacon (R-Neb.),...

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A Reader Describes the Realities of Work as a Defense Contractor

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

Writes “GS”, in response to recent articles on federal contractors and federal employees: Onsite observations of civil servants and their contractors I found what I believe to be averages:25% hard workers and people of integrity like are found everywhere50% that are average to below average25% that are useless as in not working at all and visiting with their friends who are doing the same. There are also certain protected categories who know they...

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The Last Metaphysical Right

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

The philosopher and teacher of rhetoric Richard Weaver is best known today for his book Ideas Have Consequences, which was one of the founding works of post-World War II American conservatism. Weaver argued in the book that the nominalism of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham produced a decline in Western civilization that has continued until the present day, and he called for a spiritual revival to stop the decline and, if possible, to...

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Would DOGE Dividend Checks Stoke Inflation?

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

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...

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Nazism, Fascism, and Communism: Warring Sons to a Common Father

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

What if two of history’s most infamous ideologies—Nazism and Fascism—shared more in common fundamentally with Communism than we often recognize? Recently, a chairwoman of a German political party controversially claimed that Hitler was a communist. While this assertion is incorrect, much of the criticism it drew focused only on the visible differences between Hitler and Communists, leaving their deeper ideological similarities unexamined. By...

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Elon Musk’s DOGE Sparks Chaos on Washington

2025-02-21

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2025-02-21

In the first few weeks of President Trump’s second term, the Trump administration has unleashed a barrage of executive orders and other actions intended to dizzy his detractors. So far, he has been successful. However, his opposition has taken a unique interest in President Trump’s efforts to streamline government. President Trump has tasked Elon Musk and a team of tech gurus—under the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”)—to perform...

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No, Federal Contractors Are Not More Efficient than Federal Employees

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

In late January, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders that paused Treasury payments to a variety of federal contractors and grantees. These orders also often cancelled contracts with NGOS and other contractors altogether. Soon afterward, we began to see countless media stories about job losses at private NGOs and for-profit federal contractors. Many were so heavily reliant on revenue from taxpayer cash that they immediately...

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Constitutional Dictatorship?

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

When President Trump recently began calling the Ukrainian dictator a dictator elements of both Left and Right in the Washington establishment became quite indignant over it. After all, he is their poster boy for their beloved “foreign aid.” The Ukrainian constitution allows for the suspension of elections during wartime, shouted “The Grate One,” Mark Levin of FOX News. Levin then gave the Ukrainian dictator his full throated support since, after...

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Jesus, Mises, and Private Property

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

In one of his literary masterpieces, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Mises provided a chapter titled, “Christianity and Property,” in which he wrote the following statements regarding the teachings of Jesus,But all efforts to find support for the institution of private property generally, and for private ownership in the means of production in particular, in the teachings of Christ are quite vain. No art of interpretation can find...

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Trump Cannot Allow a Declining Europe to Drag the US Down

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

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...

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How Tariffs Block Entrepreneurial Discovery and Stall Progress

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

The standard economic argument against tariffs is that, by eliminating foreign competition, they simply raise prices for consumers. While true, this argument barely scratches the surface of the problem and overlooks a critical reality: tariffs and protectionist policies do far more than just raise prices—they block the entrepreneurial discovery process that is essential for progress.The problem with this perspective is that it is rooted in a static...

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Subprime Redux: Commercial Real Estate Bond Distress Hits Another Record High

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

At the end of Q4 2024, commercial real estate continued to exhibit severe weakness, with commercial real estate bonds hitting record distress levels, surpassing the previous records reached in Q3 2024. Commercial real estate bonds are just commercial real estate loans packaged into securities and sold to investors. One category of bonds, commercial mortgage-backed securities (“CMBS”), saw their distress rate increase to 10.6 percent, a fourth...

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External Revenue or Protectionism: A Tariff Can’t be Both

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

One of President Trump’s proposals for his new term is to abolish the federal income tax and replace it with tariffs as the primary revenue source for the US federal government. In a brilliant rhetorical move, he suggests implementing this through abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and replacing it with the “External Revenue Service,” claiming that the tariffs collected by this new agency would be financed by foreigners rather than Americans....

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Decoupling America’s AI Capabilities from China Act: Another Overstep

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

The Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act—introduced by Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo.—is another attempt to stifle free speech, the free market, infringe on personal freedoms, and damage market processes.Senator Hawley, who introduced the legislation, said growing concerns over the threat from China’s development of AI warranted the proposal. The new bill would ban US persons from interacting with Chinese AI...

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Trump Is Doing a Public Service by Turning the DOJ Upside Down

2025-02-19

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2025-02-19

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would be turning things upside down, and he has kept his promises. All one has to do is to read the latest edition of the New York Times to see how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is responding: rage, rage, and more rage, as the following editorial declares:President Trump’s determination to bend the American justice system to his will, combined with his broad tolerance for...

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