Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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The Best Investment You Can Make

2024-05-28

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2024-05-28

For more than thirty years, lecturing at Mises University has been the highlight of my academic year. Students arrive filled with excitement about this experience—a weeklong intellectual feast that for many of them will be life changing. What a delight for an economics professor like me to have the opportunity to teach free market, Austrian economics to intelligent, motivated, and wonderful young people with a genuine passion for learning. Opening...

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We Oppose the State, its Socialism, and its Wars

2024-05-28

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2024-05-28

In case you haven’t read it lately—or perhaps you’ve never read it—the mission statement of the Mises Institute states that the Institute “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.”For those who find this mission statement to too non-specific, I recommend consulting the decades’ worth of...

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Biden’s Tariffs Are Another Nail in the Dollar’s Coffin

2024-05-28

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2024-05-28

President Biden recently raised taxes on American consumers and businesses and may have hastened the end of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. President Biden did this by increasing tariffs on Chinese imports.Specifically, President Biden raised tariffs on products including Chinese-produced steel and aluminum and many components imported from China for use in manufacturing electric vehicle batteries. Tariffs on Chinese-made semiconductors...

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Central Banks Are Destroying Our Economies

2024-05-28

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2024-05-28

Central banks’ monetary policies are the most perverse government intervention. Their consequences are dire, last for a very long time, and people don’t perceive them as problems or don’t comprehend the damage they are doing. Monetary policy (monetary expansion and artificially low interest rates) has five main consequences that harm overall living standards.Price InflationThis is the most obvious consequence, and yet, it is very misunderstood by...

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Alabama Abolishes Income Taxes on Gold and Silver

2024-05-27

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2024-05-27

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill on May 17 that removes all income taxes on capital gains from the sale of gold and silver, enabling the state to take an important step forward in reinforcing sound money principles.With this move, Alabama joins a growing number of states prioritizing the protection of citizens against the deleterious effects of inflation, currency debasement, and mounting federal debt.Enactment of Senate Bill 297 makes...

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Can Data by Itself Inform Us about the Real World?

2024-05-27

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2024-05-27

In order to make the data “talk,” economists utilize a range of statistical methods that vary from highly complex models to a simple display of historical data. It is generally believed that one can organize historical data through quantitative methods into a useful body of information, which in turn can serve as the basis for assessing the economy.Now, it has been observed that declines in the unemployment rate are associated with a general rise...

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Judy Shelton’s Lasting Legacies

2024-05-27

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2024-05-27

Late in his presidency Donald Trump renominated Dr. Judy Shelton to serve a fourteen-year term on the Fed’s seven-member Board of Governors, but given her written advocacy of the gold standard and her flip-flop during confirmation hearings, she failed to win the post.Had she been elected, she would be sitting among members whose job is to keep the public confused and looking the other way while counterfeiting the monopolistic monetary unit known as...

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U.S. Representative Introduces Bill to End Federal Taxation on Gold and Silver

2024-05-26

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2024-05-26

U.S. Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) has re-introduced sound money legislation to remove all federal income taxation from gold and silver coins and bullion.The Monetary Metals Tax Neutrality Act (H.R. 8279) backed by the Sound Money Defense League, Money Metals Exchange, and free-market activists – would clarify that the sale or exchange of precious metals bullion and coins are not to be included in capital gains, losses, or any other type of...

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An Unraveling, Secession, or WWIII?

2024-05-25

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2024-05-25

In a recent article, Alistair Crooke quotes former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas, who observes that Israel is in early stages of a civil war between the secular, modern Israel and the “Jewish-supremacist, ultranationalist” theocratic Israel. The vision of Israel cherished by each side is very different, and each side is increasingly unable to grant the other legitimacy of argument.Israel was and remains held together by fear and hate of a common...

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Gold Prices Rise as the Dollar Slowly Dies

2024-05-25

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2024-05-25

The money supply is rising again, and persistent price inflation is not a surprise. Price inflation occurs when the amount of currency increases significantly above private sector demand. For investors, the worst decision in this environment of monetary destruction is to invest in sovereign bonds and keep cash. The government’s destruction of the purchasing power of the currency is a policy, not a coincidence.Readers ask me why the government would...

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Fight Inflation Now

2024-05-25

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2024-05-25

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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Understanding Reason Is Paramount to Understanding Liberty

2024-05-25

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2024-05-25

Some philosophers, drawing upon Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, have questioned the nature and limits of reason. By contrast, human reason plays a central role in libertarian thought. In the ordinary dictionary sense, human reason means simply “the ability of a healthy mind to think and make judgments, especially based on practical facts.”In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises depicts reason as a universal quality common to all human beings,...

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Homeschoolers Don’t Need Government Regulation

2024-05-25

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2024-05-25

Since 2020, the number of families participating in homeschooling has increased significantly, and with it, discussions about regulations. Currently, regulations of homeschoolers are a state-by-state phenomenon, with Pennsylvania and New York among the states with the most regulations and Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma with the least. Examples of regulations include requiring parents to submit a letter of intent to homeschool prior to removing their...

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The Last Conservative

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

Milton Friedman: The Last ConservativeBy Jennifer BurnsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023; x + 587 pp.Imagine that you come across this about the “education premium” on someone’s blog: “By going to college, you are more than tripling your chances for success in after life.” The statement is buttressed by a calculation of the extra lifetime earnings that a college degree will provide. Wouldn’t you think that the author is an economist? In fact, the...

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Creative Destruction in American Higher Education: Schumpeter in Action

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1960), an Austrian political economist who emigrated to the United States in 1932 to become a professor at Harvard University, is known for his theories on business cycles and entrepreneurship.He is perhaps best known for advancing the concept of “creative destruction,” which he defined as the natural process of business firms failing at some point, freeing up resources (land, labor, and capital) that can then become more...

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Joseph Stiglitz’s Rocky Road to Serfdom

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Societyby Joseph E. StiglitzW.W. Norton, 2023; 356 pp.To say that Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who now teaches at Columbia University, opposes the free market is an understatement. He does not favor complete central planning, he tells us, but wants a balance between market and nonmarket arrangements. However, when it comes to his concrete proposals, the market seems always in his...

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Garett Jones on the Economic Impact of Culture on Immigration

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

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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Roaring Kitty vs. Chairman Powell

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

Stock market technicians are musing that if meme stocks are surging the Fed is not tight enough. Yes, after three years of hibernation “Roaring Kitty” returned with the first of a series of cryptic posts on X. Keith Gill’s (aka Roaring Kitty) post showed a man leaning forward with what looked like a gaming controller. Some traders interpreted it to mean Gill is coming back, according to Bloomberg. Gill rallied day traders on Reddit in an effort to...

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Memorial Day

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

It’s that time of year again. The first military appreciation day of the year, otherwise known as Memorial Day, is coming up on Monday, May 27.On the Sunday before this day, many conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist churches will have patriotic services where American flags are placed all over the church grounds and inside the building, the congregation recites the Pledge of Allegiance, hymns of worship to the state will be sung (including...

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The Consequences of California’s New Minimum Wage Law

2024-05-24

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2024-05-24

The law that establishes California’s minimum wage rate at twenty dollars per hour is purportedly aimed at uplifting the state’s working poor. The role of economics is to evaluate such claims through economic theory and empirical evidence. In mainstream economics, commonly taught in introductory college courses, the conventional analysis indicates that such laws may lead to heightened unemployment only if the new minimum wage exceeds the market...

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