Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may be the 1970 Nobel Prize winner for literature, but that does not make his work The Gulag Archipelago enjoyable reading. The detailed description of the methods of torture employed within the Soviet system alone will turn many readers away. Beyond the interrogations are the trials based upon a mock-legal system epitomized by Soviet jurist Andrei Vyshinsky’s theory that truth is relative and that evidence can be ignored, to be replaced by...

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The number of U.S. commercial foreclosures spiked to 635 in January 2024 from a low of 141 in May 2020 reports real estate data firm ATTOM. The January count was up 17% from the previous month and roughly twice as many as in January 2023. “Commercial property deals in the US are picking back up at deep discounts—and forcing lenders to face just how far real estate prices have fallen,” notes Sarah Holder on Bloomberg’s “Big Take” podcast.Bloomberg commercial real...

The sight of fresh snow is always invigorating to me, so I was happy to wake up the other day to a blanket of snow—roughly three inches—on my yard. I was less happy, though, to see the same blanket still covering the street in my neighborhood. Things took an even-more disheartening turn when, a few hours later around 10 a.m., I got to the main state road at the end of my street: still snow covered, despite the relatively meager (for this area) snowfall and the fact...

G.K. Chesterton is a somewhat controversial author in most libertarian circles. As an intelligent man who wisely predicted a century out so many of the problems we face today, he has garnered great respect among many who have read him. However, as a proponent of distributism, advocating ideas such as “the taxation of contracts so as to discourage the sale of small property to big proprietors and encourage the break-up of big property among small proprietors,” he has...

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released January figures for Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) today, including the price index based on that data.News headlines report the year-over-year percent change in the PCE price index: 2.4%. This gives the impression that price inflation is heading towards the Federal Reserve’s supposed target of 2%.But the data is released monthly, and this way of calculating inflation is slightly misleading. As Joseph...

A recent rash of libertarian-leaning right-wing podcasters’ rehashing of a shopworn takedown of socialism has bothered me to the point of launching into this essay. It goes something like “Why is this still a thing? When are they going to realize that IT DOESN’T WORK, and drop it?”This criticism deserves a closer look. Maybe socialism does too. By the way, I define the term as any economic paradigm that turns over the means of production to “society,” “the workers,”...

Originally published September 1977 in Libertarian Review.In any debate between a socialist and a free-market capitalist, all too often the socialist quickly puts the free-market advocate on the defensive, and the entire time is consumed by the free-market person fending off attacks on the ability of the market to prevent inequality, or business cycles, or even the ravages of affluence and "materialism." Being on the offensive, socialism emerges spotless and...

Imagine someone giving a State of the World address that begins with a reminder that people possess free will and ought to be doing a better job of exercising it. This could possibly raise doubts about the speaker’s mental stability—at least until the talk went into the dark details of civilization’s condition. If the state of the world reflects the choices people make, and if those choices are autonomous, originating from within the minds of individuals, then the...

There will be life after Trump one way or another, but in the long run, it seems as though the ruling party always wins. Original Article: After Trump, Then What? [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter