Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Another Presidential Debate, Another Loss for the Palestinians

2024-07-10

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2024-07-10

In a recent article for the Mises Wire, Connor O’Keeffe rightly argues that President Joe Biden indisputably failed at appearing psychologically and physiologically well during the recent presidential debate. O’Keeffe further goes on to write that former President Donald Trump “did a perfectly good job” at looking stable enough against the characterization of him by many democrats as an “unhinged maniac” intent on “tearing the country down.”If one...

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Biden Is Not Running the Government. So, Who Is?

2024-07-10

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2024-07-10

After a disastrous debate performance two weeks ago and a weak damage-control interview last Friday, it’s finally become clear to almost everyone that President Joe Biden is not running the federal government.Every four years, we’re supposed to pretend that a single individual, who we collectively choose at the ballot box, takes charge of the federal government and acts as we would to address the problems we face at home and abroad.Biden’s...

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It Is Time to Treat Higher Education as the Business It Is

2024-07-09

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2024-07-09

So many of the problems with higher education stem from the involvement of government in the market.Not a day goes by without a TikTok video surfacing of unhappy Gen-Zers or millennials lamenting their career choices that stemmed from college education. On top of this, student debt has become a hot-button political issue. And nearly every conservative laments the rise of such degrees as “gender studies” or “sociology” that seem to be little more...

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Biden and Trump Prove That They Still Don’t Understand the Economy

2024-07-09

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2024-07-09

The American people have the great pleasure of electing either Joe Biden or Donald Trump as president this year. With the election approaching, formal debates between the candidates have begun. A lot has been said about President Biden’s shaky performance or former President Trump’s comments on the 2020 election, but their comments on the economy or trade have seen less attention. Both presidents spent trillions on government programs, increased...

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Rushing for the Financial Exits

2024-07-09

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2024-07-09

For this week’s episode, I wanted to find something familiar in the form of a “saying” to try and convey my thoughts about the economy as it stands today. I even thought about nursery rhymes like “ring around the Rosie” and “musical chairs,” but those did not exactly fit and did not stand up to historical or logical scrutiny the way I hoped.I settled on “When Everyone Runs for the Exit.” This is a play off the legal doctrine limiting free speech of...

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The Reality of Human Action

2024-07-09

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2024-07-09

The concept of reality is questioned by the notion, as László Krasznahorkai expressed it, that there are “many realities, or none at all.” By contrast, in Human Action, Ludwig von Mises offers a clear concept of reality, which he describes as “the whole complex of all causal relations between events, which wishful thinking cannot alter.” Building on this idea, Murray Rothbard argues that the entire science of human action can be deduced from a few...

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Bring Back the Political “Smoke-Filled Rooms”

2024-07-08

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2024-07-08

As anyone who is conscious knows by now, the Joe Biden re-election campaign is in serious trouble. The president clearly showed signs of serious mental deterioration in his recent debate with Donald Trump and Biden’s performance was bad enough for even the New York Times (which had claimed up to the debate that Biden’s cognitive skills were fine, and anything said to the contrary was a lie) to call for him to drop out of the race.Biden, not...

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It Didn’t Begin with LBJ: How the US Became a Transfer Society

2024-07-08

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2024-07-08

Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill’s fascinating account traces the decline of the American constitutional framework from its origins in laissez-faire individualism to its current state of redistributive collectivism. Viewing the evolution as a series of legal developments motivated by ever greater financial incentives to involve the federal government, they highlight the following pivotal cases: (1) Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established...

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Do We Have Regrets While Celebrating July 4?

2024-07-08

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2024-07-08

This is a transcript from Mark Thornton’s Podcast, “Minor Issues,” July 6.Well, I know that many of my listeners will have a certain number of regrets about the July 4th holiday. And some of them may not even celebrate it at all. I certainly share many of those regrets. And concerns about the future of our country.We have an extremely bad government. That has increased in size and power enormously. We have a national debt which has exploded in size...

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British Sound Money MP Replaced by Labor Party Apparatchik: A Sign of the Times

2024-07-08

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2024-07-08

Sound money advocate and Conservative Party MP for Wycombe Steve Baker lost his seat in the general election that took place on 4th July–curious timing for a sitting Prime Minister to have called an election his party was always near-certain to lose. As Americans were celebrating Independence Day, the remnant Brits opposed to the government meddling in every aspect of their lives were bracing for a prime minister who describes himself as a...

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It’s All MMT: The Fraud of “Monetary Policy”

2024-07-08

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2024-07-08

Modern monetary theory (MMT) is not convincing to most trained economists of various schools of thought. This causes many to balk at MMT and mock it, some of which is warranted as a reductio ad absurdum, especially given some of MMT’s more outlandish claims. In fact, my own thesis was an Austrian critique of MMT.But there is also a fair amount of hypocrisy in the non-Austrian (e.g., mainstream, Keynesian, monetarist) critiques of MMT by mainstream...

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War and Inflation

2024-07-06

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2024-07-06

[This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s conference on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.]The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign...

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The State of US Real Estate Is Not Good

2024-07-06

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2024-07-06

The Home BuyersAs reported by ZeroHedge recently, the NAR U.S. Pending Home Sales Index dropped 2.1 percent MoM in May, down 6.6 percent YoY.To put these numbers into perspective, the current index is at 70.8, or 70.8 percent of the contract activity in the base year 2001. This is lower than any point during the 2008 financial crisis; even lower than 2020, when lockdowns brought markets to a screeching halt. This is the lowest level of contract...

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Praxeology and Animals

2024-07-06

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2024-07-06

Many academic fields are devoted to reconstructing reality, to make reality fit their socialist ideals better. Those who wish to reconstruct reality argue, for example, that there is no reason why some animals should be regarded as “wild.” They argue that we should seek “new ways to think and act in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity” and that there is no reason to exclude the animal world from that enterprise. Instead, “we...

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Public Goods, Government Transfers, and Lawsuits for Clean Air and Climate Mitigation

2024-07-06

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2024-07-06

Since the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society, the US federal budget has shifted from providing pubic goods to distributing transfers (in the form of both spending and lending) to favored groups, a continually metastasizing shift that has now created a federal budgetary and debt crisis. It has also allowed politicians to perfect the fine art of buying votes by awarding federal transfers to select voter groups as a means to winning...

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July 4th Regrets

2024-07-06

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2024-07-06

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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What If Public Schools Were Abolished?

2024-07-05

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2024-07-05

In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long lines of people hope to be hired.Why is this? It has something to do with the fact that public schools...

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Tackling More of Robert Reich’s ‘Economic Myths’

2024-07-05

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2024-07-05

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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Milei Snubs the Spanish Political Establishment

2024-07-05

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2024-07-05

Argentinian president Javier Milei recently snubbed the Spanish political class by visiting Spain and refusing to meet with any government officials, attending a rally of the opposition party Vox, and insinuating that the socialist Spanish president’s wife—currently at the heart of an anticorruption case—was corrupt. In retaliation, the Spanish president recalled his country’s ambassador from Buenos Aires.Now none of this will interest those who...

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Argument by Fiat

2024-07-05

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2024-07-05

The economist and social critic Glenn C. Loury has written a book sure to attract attention, but in what follows, I don’t propose to address what is likely to be the principal source of that attention. In Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (W.W. Norton, 2024), Loury has offered an account of his life that reads like a romantic thriller. Readers in search of salacious gossip will find it in abundance. It transpires, for example,...

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