Wonka: A Tale of Evil Businessmen and Cronyism
2024-01-09
Wonka (2023) is a prequel film to the beloved story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Wonka tells the story of a young Willy Wonka, an up-and-coming chocolate salesman and magician, who challenges a chocolate cartel’s dominance.
As one could imagine, the film is full of scenes that cast private enterprise in a negative light. The main villains are stereotypical movie businessmen who will do anything, even murder, to achieve their ambition for higher profits. The cartel constantly violates Wonka’s private property, first by poisoning his merchandise and then by attempting to murder him.
Another scene shows Wonka signing a contract with hidden terms that essentially makes him a slave. With the legitimacy of this contract dubious, it is unlikely any just legal system would
Exposing the Price Level Myth
2024-01-04
Price inflation statistics were a hot topic in 2023. Official measures, like the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI), rose to levels not seen in over four decades.
These measures were under commentators’ microscopes as recently as last week. The FRED Blog (run by the St. Louis Fed) briefly discussed how these two measures are constructed and how they differ. Paul Krugman compared the change in the “core” versions of the PCE and CPI (which remove components like food and energy) over six- and twelve-month time intervals, respectively. The consensus view is that these measures have unique applications. According to Krugman, “which one you should choose depends on what question you’re trying to answer.”
But if you read Mises, you’ll see a
The State Does Not Compromise and Neither Will We
2023-12-27
I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.”
Henry Hazlitt never retired to the beach, and his great voice, once described by Ludwig von Mises as “the
1 comment
Jonny Öhman
2018-09-10 at 16:37 (UTC 2) Link to this comment
Flum