Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Economists and the State: From Enemies to Friends

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

Economists and the state are natural enemies. The central principle of economics is that the means for improving human well-being—what economists call “goods”—are naturally scarce and must be produced before they can be used to satisfy human wants. The scarcity principle also implies that, once produced, goods cannot be bestowed on one person without depriving some other person or persons of their use. In other words, there is no such thing as a...

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Nock’s Enemy, the State

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

Our Enemy, the Stateby Albert Jay Nock This year the theme of the Institute’s Supporters Summit was “Our Enemy, the State.” What better book review for this issue of The Misesian, then, than a discussion of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, first published in 1935? In what follows, I’ll talk about some of the insights in that book.Nock draws a distinction between the state and society, though sometimes he describes this distinction as between...

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The Misesian, vol. 1, no. 6, 2024

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

Another national election has come and gone, and like many of our readers, I think the less awful candidate won. After all, a victory for Kamala Harris was likely to be interpreted as an endorsement of the status quo and a “mandate” for more of the same.Unfortunately, though, opposition to the status quo is not the same thing as support for peace, freedom, or free markets. Dissatisfaction with the regime is good, but it’s not enough. We will see...

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The Second Trump Term and the “Sanctions Industrial Complex”

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

As the Washington drawbridge lowers for a second Trump administration, the world attempts to glean any insights that might indicate the direction of his second term. At the top of the list of concerns is the topic of sanctions.As of 2024, the US is actively sanctioning a third of all nations on earth. As the American populace grew more wary of military entanglements and forever wars, consecutive administrations have exponentially escalated the use...

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Printing Power: The Central Bank and the State

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on October 12, 2024.“Printing Power” in our title has a double meaning: It can mean “printing power”—the power to print money, which central banks have. But we will focus on “printing power”—the central bank’s money printing as an essential source of the power of the state, including of course the Federal Reserve’s printing to...

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Selections from Our Enemy, the State: Supports Summit 2024

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

All States Are Empires of Economic Lies—Tom DiLorenzoI’m going to start out by expressing my agreement with Doug Casey, who wrote about the economics profession of today. Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists. They tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.This has been going on for a long time. Here’s the founding document of the American Economic...

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The Bailout Fallacy

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

What Went Wrong with Capitalismby Ruchir SharmaSimon and Schuster, 2024; 384 pp.It is always encouraging when a non–Austrian School economist accepts through his own reasoning an essential tenet of Austrian economics. Ruchir Sharma, who is chairman of Rockefeller International, founder and chief investments officer of Breakout Capital, and a well-known economic journalist, is not an Austrian, though he is aware of Friedrich Hayek’s work. He lends...

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Why Politicians Love Tariffs

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

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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Who Ultimately Pays the Cost of Protective Tariffs?

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

It is a benefit of sound economic theory that it proves very useful in the refutation of popular fallacies and misconceptions about the workings of the market economy. One such fallacy is the assertion that government interventions through protective tariffs are without negative consequences for the people of the imposing country. Politicians and statesmen have employed these talking points to earn the support of the majority of the voting masses...

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The USS Liberty and America’s Greatest “Ally”

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

The recent destruction of the Syrian regime, replaced by Islamists and Jihadists, reminds us that the American foreign-policy establishment in Washington continues to do the bidding of the State of Israel which exerts its influence through one of the most well-funded and extensive lobbying efforts Washington has ever known. The surreptitious alliance of terrorist Syrian Rebels, Israelis, and Americans, is just the latest manifestation of this...

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No, A Continuing Resolution Is Not a Stopgap

2024-12-12

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2024-12-12

Congress recently passed a “continuing resolution” to avoid a government shutdown. We are good to go now. Government agencies may continue to operate while Congress tries to agree on the actual budget for the 2025 fiscal year that started on October 1st.A continuing resolution (CR) is commonly called a “stopgap.” In fact, a Google search yields almost no other modern uses of the term. But is “stopgap” an appropriate term for this thing?Modern...

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Provoked: The Long Train of Abuses that Culminated in the Ukraine War

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

[Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, by Scott Horton, The Libertarian Institute, 2024; 690 pp.]“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” Scott Horton is the liberty movement’s foreign policy hedgehog, endeavoring to convince the American public of one essential truth: the folly of war. But within that sphere, Horton is a fox, weaving an encyclopedic knowledge of various...

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Hunter Biden Is Evil—and So Is Joe

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

The unusually extensive “pardon” by lame-duck “President” Biden has been much in the news lately, but the pardon is not the main issue we should be interested in. The real issue is that the Bidens, both father and son, are evil. Hunter’s Biden’s “lost” laptop—which 501 “security professionals” falsely claimed was a Russian fake —reveals warmongering brazen in its duplicity.Concerning the pardon, only this need be said. Of course no one should be...

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The Real Scandal of Hunter’s Pardon

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

Politicians and pundits spent much of last week commenting on President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter for lying on a federal gun purchase form, failing to pay taxes, and any other offenses he may have committed over the past decade. Much of the controversy is because President Biden repeatedly pledged that he would never pardon his son.Some have also observed that the pardon’s timeline starts the year Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukraine...

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The Pretense of Knowledge

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

[Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Nobel Prize Lecture, delivered at the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Prize in economics in Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1974. This lecture, along with “A Free-Market Monetary system,” can be found here in book form.]The particular occasion of this lecture, combined with the chief practical problem which economists have to face today, have made the choice of its topic almost inevitable....

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Can Trump Save the Dollar?

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

During his 2024 presidential campaign Donald Trump repeatedly and in grave terms highlighted the possibility of the US dollar losing its world reserve currency status. This occurred at summits with business leaders at the New York and Chicago Economic Clubs.Trump occupies a rather unique position in this debate since he recognizes the real possibility of the dollar losing its world currency status, he opposes this change and wishes to prevent it,...

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Progressivism and the Murder of a Health Insurance CEO

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

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 Fight against the Left Is an Ideological One

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Skyhorse Publishing, 2024; 258 pp.With their profoundly mediocre new book Unhumans: the Secret History of Communist Revolutions, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec inadvertently illustrate some of the reasons why conservatives so often fail to counter the ideological victories of the Left. Like so many conservative activists before them,...

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What Modern Economists Can Learn from the Austrian School of Economics

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

The Austrian School of Economics represents a heterodox methodological approach to economics that significantly differs from the orthodox teachings represented by mainstream economics. The Austrian School’s approach is multidisciplinary, comprising not only economists but also historians, sociologists, jurists, and philosophers who aim to explain social phenomena stemming from human action, which serves as the fundamental pillar of the school....

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There Is No Right to a Minimum Wage

2024-12-11

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2024-12-11

One of the most popular economic fallacies of our time is the belief that the absence of a minimum wage would lead to limitless exploitation of employees in the economy. Minimum wage legislation prevents employees from being hired at pay rates below the mandated amount. Proponents of minimum wage laws claim that not having a minimum wage would lead to employees being paid very little for the amount of work they do. They also claim that everyone...

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