Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

Though popular, nationalizations ruin economies

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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Woodrow Wilson and Freedom

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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Anarchy in the UK

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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Unelected technocrats are now the nation’s chief executives

President Biden has not been seen in public since announcing he would not seek re-election on Sunday. Biden’s “resignation” was nothing more than a text-only post on Twitter/X—and we know that the president does not manage his own social media accounts. There has been no video of the president making an announcement, and the White House is apparently planning no press conference or official act of any kind. Biden has not been seen by anyone except...

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Trump and Biden can’t wait to send more assistance to Ukraine

Trump and Biden cannot wait to send more assistance to UkraineThe most recent presidential debate allowed American voters to compare the policies and rhetoric of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. There was a lot of posturing and insulting, but below it all were comments on foreign policy which must be addressed. With roughly two and a half years of large-scale fighting between Russia and Ukraine, increasing tension between...

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The Republican platform ignores the real causes of inflation

The 2024 Republican platform promises that, if Donald Trump returns to the White House and Republicans gain complete control of Congress, they will reduce inflation. The platform contains some proposals, such as reducing regulations and extending the 2017 tax reductions, that may help lower prices in some sectors and spur economic growth. However, the GOP platform does not address how the Federal Reserve’s enabling of spendaholic politicians...

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Revolutionary violence and the Left

Democracy is not the best political system, and its defects have been amply exposed in Hans-Hermann-Hoppe’s great book, Democracy: The God That Failed. But we do live in a democracy, for better or worse, and in this system, the winner of an election is entitled to take power. The Left doesn’t accept this. If they oppose a candidate, they will subject him to venomous hatred and suggest that it would be a good thing if he was killed. We saw this is...

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Legal discrimination in apartheid and equity

As South Africa and most countries of the West attempt to enforce a state-led program of resource allocation based on race under the aegis of “equity,” it is timely to reevaluate the lessons to be learned from Walter Williams’ account of “South Africa’s War Against Capitalism.” In this book, Williams studies the economic effects of enforcing “a pervasive system of legalized racial discrimination.”His main aim is to counter the widespread view that...

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The American tradition of abolishing central banks

In discussing the Mises Institute’s June 24th full-page Wall Street Journal ad entitled “Who Needs the Fed?” on talk radio recently most of the interviewers naturally expressed skepticism over whether the Fed could ever actually be abolished and a gold-and-silver standard reinstituted. It reminded me of something Murray Rothbard said about this. If the government had monopolized say, shoe production a hundred years ago and someone suggested the...

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Biden’s 5% cap on apartment rents: Washington’s latest economic folly

Recently, the Biden administration introduced plans to limit increases in apartment rents to 5% annually. Far from a straightforward cap, this plan contains various nuances, which I will explain below. Nevertheless, the basic fraud on display here is twofold.First, the state continues to ignore private property rights while manipulating markets with price controls – an attempt to commandeer the market’s fundamental role of price discovery and place...

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The degrowth movement is antihuman, and its advocates are fine with that

The assimilation of degrowth ideas into the mainstream portends dire consequences for economic well-being. Degrowth is trumpeted as the solution to averting a climate catastrophe, but it will reverse the economic fortunes of practitioners. Sustained economic growth became the norm recently in history, and surely most people don’t want a return to a preindustrial era with episodic growth and lower living standards. The typical person today would be...

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The cost of a hoax

The cost of a hoaxThe scandal surrounding Canada’s Kamloops Indian Residential School (1890-1969, British Columbia) is an ultracautionary tale about the damage inflicted by self-interested politicians and activists, backed by a media that toes the line. The 2021 scandal sprang from the alleged discovery of 215 graves of indigenous children. They were said to have died under suspicious circumstances at the Catholic-run school and then buried in...

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The party of “democracy” will now choose your candidate for you

On Sunday, July 21, President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign via a text-only post on Twitter/X. Less than an hour later, Biden—also via a text-only post on Twitter/X—endorsed vice president Kamala Harris for the presidency. Thus, in just a few minutes, the ruling party in Washington completely erased the primary election process from one of the country’s major parties. That is, the same Democratic party that tells us it is the...

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‘Net zero’ and Keynesian ‘stimulus’ are making us poorer

If you read the latest OECD publication, “Employment Outlook 2024: The Net Zero Transition and the Labour Market,” you would imagine that the world has not gone through the largest monetary and fiscal stimulus in decades.The results are so poor, they are embarrassing. Furthermore, the report illustrates the impoverishment of citizens and subtly suggests that achieving the net zero goal will present an even greater challenge. Translation: You will...

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Does the Fed Push Interest Rates Down? History Says Yes

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Jason Purcell joins Bob to discuss his historical analysis of yield curves (in both UK and US) going back to the 1870s, which shows that central banks do indeed manipulate short-term interest rates.

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What Was Missing at NatCon 2024

National Conservatives are a growing movement on the political right. They are largely united by their belief in the failings of liberalism, in protectionist trade policy, a halt to mass migration, and a more Christianized nation. The attendees of this year’s conference, hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation, focused on many topics: free trade, their desire to decouple from China, weaponization of government, bureaucracy in government, and even the...

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An Austrian contribution to the praxeology of nature conservation

Without human intervention, there would be no nature conservation, only the natural struggle for species survival through evolution and adaptation. Humans actively protect and shape their surroundings, making nature conservation a practically anthropocentric concept.The conservation of natural elements involves counteracting undesirable changes to those elements and their conditioning environment. Broadly, nature protection includes activities...

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Why Economic Inequality Is a Good Thing

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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The 1866 civil rights revolution

The phrase “equality of opportunity” is expressed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a nondiscrimination principle. There has been much debate on whether the nondiscrimination principle is a formal right to equality before the law, reflecting the principle that everyone has a right not to be discriminated against, or whether it is a substantive right vested in specified groups (e.g., blacks or women) to give them special legal protection that...

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Full-Time Jobs Fall Yet Again as Total Employment Flattens

According to the most recent report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy added 206,000 jobs during June while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.1 percent. Unlike most months over the past year—which repeatedly described the employment situation as “strong” and “a blowout”—the general media narrative for the June jobs report was far less enthusiastic. According to CNN, for example, the June jobs report...

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