Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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The State Wants to Nationalize Second Mortgages. What Possibly Can Go Wrong?

2024-06-21

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2024-06-21

Recently, Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise, sought approval from its oversight agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), to purchase and guarantee second mortgages in the United States.While the business case for this proposal is deficient (for an excellent perspective on that, see the article by R. Christopher Whalen), I will discuss the economic and political premises behind this move and its possible consequences.What Does...

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There Is No Such Thing as “Wage Slavery”

2024-06-20

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2024-06-20

Unless you work for a bank or the government, you may not have noticed that yesterday was a federal holiday—Juneteenth—commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This is a perfectly good thing to celebrate, of course, but alas, as Connor O’Keeffe has recently noted, since the day was declared a federal holiday in 2021, it has largely been used by leftwing groups to push ever larger amounts of government intervention in favor of the...

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Wages, Unemployment, and Inflation

2024-06-20

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2024-06-20

[This essay originally appeared in Christian Economics, March 4, 1958. It was reprinted as chapter 10 of Planning for Freedom.]Our economic system — the market economy or capitalism — is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the necessity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the consumers can afford and are...

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Joe Biden’s Reverse Robin Hood Student Debt Cancellation

2024-06-20

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2024-06-20

The Biden administration recently announced that it is canceling another $7.7 billion in student debt, and this will bring the total amount of student debt it has forgiven to over $160 billion since 2021.The reason for this aggressive push on the topic of student debt, according to some political analysts, is that in the three years Joe Biden has been in office, he has failed to do enough in regard to this issue. As expected, this has left some of...

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Farage, Le Pen, and the Rise of the European Right

2024-06-20

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2024-06-20

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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BLS: The Private Sector Lost 192,000 Jobs in Q3 2023

2024-06-20

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2024-06-20

The most recent Business Employment Dynamics (BED) summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the US economy lost 192,000 private-sector jobs during the third quarter of 2023. According to the BLS: From June 2023 to September 2023, gross job losses from closing and contracting private-sector establishments were 7.8 million, a decrease of 37,000 jobs from the previous quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over this...

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How Slavery Radicalized Lysander Spooner

2024-06-19

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2024-06-19

How does a radical libertarian abolitionist attorney from the North go from passionately defending the United States Constitution–arguing that the document prohibited slavery from its ratification–to declaring the United States Constitution “unfit to exist” two decades later?Lysander Spooner wrote The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1845 as a response to William Lloyd Garrison, who opposed the Constitution due to its apparent preservation of...

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Ten Reasons Not to Abolish Slavery

2024-06-19

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2024-06-19

Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions ranging from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and even violent assault.When people...

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Growth in Government Jobs Points to Recession

2024-06-19

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2024-06-19

Last week, we looked at the weakness of the job market that belies all the happy talk from the administration about employment. For instance, we noted the fact that full-time employment is in decline, as is temporary work. We can couple this with the fact that the total number of employed persons in this economy has gone nowhere in eleven months. On top of all this, another indicator of the lackluster jobs economy is the volume of government-job...

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The Concise Fundamentals of “Human Rights”

2024-06-19

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2024-06-19

A thorough review of the existing literature on human rights finds a problem: it takes a book or lengthy chapter to describe them. Because of the complexity, many people misconstrue rights versus other human social engagements, such as obligations, promises, relationships, or privileges. This article summarizes an accurate but concise description of human rights theory, with a few examples, in a more readily accessible fashion that won’t require...

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Watch Our Latest Fed Documentary Teaser

2024-06-19

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2024-06-19

Mises is on the march, and the elites are terrified.For decades, the most powerful institutions, from academia to the corporate press, have made a concerted effort to marginalize the wisdom of Austrian economics. Their control is breaking. From Tucker Carlson to UFC, the name Ludwig von Mises has reached the masses in ways he could have never imagined.Now, we’re looking to take it to the next level.We are releasing our newest documentary, exposing...

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The Problem with Juneteenth

2024-06-19

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2024-06-19

Today is Juneteenth. One hundred fifty-nine years ago, on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and declared that all slaves in the state were free. The following year, in 1866, residents of the town where Granger had issued the order celebrated the anniversary as “Jubilee Day.” Eventually, the name changed to Juneteenth, and in 1979, it became a Texas state holiday. Then, in 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill...

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Understanding the Montaigne Fallacy

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

With the world moving more and more in the direction of trade protectionism and war, it is worth remembering the origin of the fallacies upon which this movement is based.Michel Montaigne, the sixteenth-century minor politician and writer, is credited with the illogical view that trade and exchange result in one person winning and the other losing.

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The Plot To Destroy Our Children

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

Last week, a conversation with a waitress disturbed me a lot. She told me that she was homeschooling her sixteen-year old son, who is autistic, because she was afraid that he would be subjected to “tranny” propaganda and encouraged to “transition” to being a woman. Even worse, he might be put in touch with “doctors” who would mutilate him by injecting him with hormones and even castrating him, all without his parents’ knowledge. You might think the...

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The Fallacies of Conservative Protectionists

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

In responding to economic fallacies that mainstream free traders make, the American Compass makes some of their own.The American Compass—headed by Oren Cass, who once staffed Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign—is the modern descendant of Alexander Hamilton. To those unfamiliar with Hamilton beyond the Federalist Papers, that is hardly a compliment.The Compass, whose writers and staffers join a long list of protectionists gunning for a future...

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We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis…and Lost

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation? The failed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” and the disastrous floating Gaza pier are but two recent examples of enormously expensive initiatives that, though they no-doubt enriched military contractors, were incapable of meeting their stated goals.Prophets of War: Lockh...Hartung, WilliamBest Price: $10.13Buy New $14.99(as of 02:45...

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This Week’s Mania: Reservations!

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

When something valuable is mispriced at say zero, speculators appear to grease the wheels of commerce while earning a little something for themselves. This is all well and good until the government steps in to put a stop to the speculator’s arbitrage. The real issue is, “There were just too many diners for too few restaurants,” Appointment Trader founder Jonas Frey told Bloomberg. “I believe we’re serving a need. That’s why it worked.” A thriving...

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Scott Galloway’s TED Talk Reveals a Basic Ignorance of Economics

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

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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Debunking Robert Reich’s Debunking

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

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 »

Unsuccessful DEI Efforts Meet Legislative Opposition in Tennessee

2024-06-18

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2024-06-18

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 »