Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Employed Workers Dwindle and Full-Time Jobs Fall as the Fed Readies More Easy Money

2024-12-06

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2024-12-06

According to today’s report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy added 227,000 payroll jobs during November, according to the establishment survey. The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.2 percent. This follows October’s jobs report which was the weakest since 2020. In October, private-sector employment fell month-over-month by 2,000 jobs.So, many media outlets described this latest report as a “rebound” or...

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What Has Government Done to Our Money?

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

The Mises Institute is currently in a campaign to distribute copies of Rothbard’s What has government done to our money. You can order free copies from the front page of Mises.org.Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues podcast. I’m Mark Thornton coming to you from the Mises Institute. Please like, share, and subscribe. Thank you.In What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Murray Rothbard changes your whole view of the world, not...

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Slash Military Spending: “Defense” Budgets are Bigger than Ever Before

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

It should go without saying that asking generals and other Pentagon bureaucrats about defense spending is like asking your barber if you need a haircut. They are hardly disinterested observers. So, it’s not surprising at all that the usual pentagon uniformed technocrats, after failing their audit for the seventh time in a row, remain unrepentant. Last month, after failing to provide documentation showing the Pentagon actually knows what it does...

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Prices Are Not Measurements of Value

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

With a few exceptions, several epistemological procedures in the science of economics are heavily swayed by the gale force of empiricism or logical positivism. Consequently, we increasingly find the science of economics compartmentalized into various methodological schools which, to various degrees, are keen on importing the methods of the natural sciences at the expense of the actual task of economics.Within economics, there are entrenched...

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Trump Faces a Mess of an Economy

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

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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There Is No Appetite for Fed Reform in Washington

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

Today in Politico, finance reporter Victoria Guida takes a look at the prospects for any meaningful reform that might rein in the Fed’s runaway powers that have expanded far beyond its historical remit in recent years.It seems the prospects are not good. For starters, the president-elect has no interest at all in having the Fed do less. As president, Trump has only ever called for lower interest rates, which means he always favored a more activist...

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Elon Musk and The Grace Commission Report

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

Elon Musk—of Tesla, SpaceX, and X fame—will be tasked by incoming President-elect Donald Trump to review federal government efficiency with the intent to cut federal spending, reform existing programs, possible shutdown of federal agencies, etc. Elon should be encouraged to study a herculean report done in the first term of President Ronald Reagan called The President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also called the President’s Private...

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The FBI Has Been Political from the Start

2024-12-05

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2024-12-05

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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The FBI Has Been Political from the Start

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced he intends to appoint Kash Patel as director of the FBI. The news sparked an immediate frenzy from establishment figures across media and politics. Legal and national security “experts” were deployed to the Sunday morning news shows to characterize the move as evidence that Trump intends to politicize the FBI and use it as a weapon against his many political opponents.The political establishment’s concerns...

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The Biggest Mistake America Has Ever Made

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

The biggest mistake America has ever made since the nation’s founding was the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state. If the American people are ever going to achieve a genuinely free society, a necessary prerequisite is the dismantling of the national-security establishment and the restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.America’s...

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From Indentureship to Entrepreneurship

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

Jean-Claude Escalante’s From Indentureship to Entrepreneurship is an extraordinary exploration of the Indo-Trinidadian community’s journey from humble indentured laborers to influential figures in the arenas of academia, commerce, and industry. Escalante skillfully dismantles common assumptions that attribute Indo-Trinidadian success solely to preferential colonial policies, instead presenting a nuanced analysis that emphasizes the community’s...

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From Indenturehsip to Entrepreneurship

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

Jean Claude Escalante’s From Indentureship to Entrepreneurship is an extraordinary exploration of the Indo-Trinidadian community’s journey from humble indentured laborers to influential figures in the arenas of academia, commerce, and industry. Escalante skillfully dismantles common assumptions that attribute Indo-Trinidadian success solely to preferential colonial policies, instead presenting a nuanced analysis that emphasizes the community’s...

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Want to Cut Federal Workers? Just Cut Spending.

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been making a lot of noise about all the federal employees it plans to fire. The DOGE people have framed total federal employment as something of a proxy for the total size of the federal government.  Cutting the federal workforce is all well and good, but in reality, the size of the federal payrolls doesn’t really tell us much about the growth of the federal government. Federal...

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Hartung: Can Trump Still Be a Peace President?

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

[Editor’s Note: In this selection from his new essay “Seeds of Resistance,” William Hartung provides some interesting context on the important role of public opinion and public pressure in pushing back against aggressive foreign policy in any presidential administration. Essentially, Hartung expresses hope that perhaps Trump will be something like Ronald Reagan whose bellicose pre-election rhetoric was far worse than the actual policies that Reagan...

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Some Depositors Are More Equal than Others

2024-12-04

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2024-12-04

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”―George Orwell, Animal FarmThe nation’s deposit insurer (FDIC) let slip the other day which large depositors were bailed out when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed last spring. SVB banked the nation’s tech illuminate.Its failure exposed fractional reserve banking’s Achilles heel when a bank run was initiated via social media and carried out with depositors moving money on their...

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North and South in Antiracist Revisionism

2024-12-03

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2024-12-03

The history of slavery in the United States cannot be covered in a brief article, but one point that is important to address in the context of contemporary “antiracist” debates is the notion that slavery was historically supported by the South and opposed by the North. The aim of antiracists, in advancing that notion, is to justify the destruction of Confederate monuments, the proscribing of Confederate flags, and the renaming of military bases. It...

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US Bond Yields Rise as Reserve Currency Status Wanes

2024-12-03

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2024-12-03

With much consternation, capital markets participants are watching US treasury bond yields go up while Jerome Powell and the Fed continue to lower the Fed Funds Rate in an effort to spur another round of easy money.The Fed Funds rate is a short-term interest rate used for interbank borrowing. US treasury bonds are medium-long term securities that represent the sovereign debt of the US government, so the yield on those bonds represents the US...

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Biden’s Parting Shot at America

2024-12-03

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2024-12-03

The interim between a US presidential election and the swearing in of a new Administration has for most of our history been a non-eventful period where the outgoing Administration winds down operations and the incoming Administration ramps up new personnel before the inauguration.The 20th Amendment to our Constitution was enacted in 1933 to reduce the “lame duck” period between election and inauguration to January 20th instead of March 4th....

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Why Naomi Wolf Is Great

2024-12-03

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2024-12-03

Naomi Wolf is a truly heroic figure, and the publication of her great book The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity makes her heroic stature even more evident than it was before. I’m not going to write a detailed review of the book, because it consists of thousands of documents that a lawsuit she initiated compelled Pfizer to release. I’ll just mention a few of the highlights. Pfizer knew a couple of months after its vaccine was ruled...

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Another Merit of Medieval Bolognese Canons

2024-12-03

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2024-12-03

In a previous article, I had the pleasure of exposing how several canon law jurists from the University of Bologna, in Italy, influenced the works of later theologians and economic scholars from the School of Salamanca, whose theologians—for many Austrian economic scholars—are the fathers of modern economic thought.In the prior article, I spoke of the intellectual terrain built by the Bolognese of the fourteenth century that allowed the discoveries...

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