It seems U.S. government officials are entitled to blindfold and deceive the American people to avoid “intruding” on foreign leaders planning a military attack? This theory of democracy gets curiouser and curiouser. Original Article: Truth Is the Biggest Threat to Democracy in DC [embedded content] Tags:...
Read More »Experiencing the Rothbard Graduate Seminar: Who Should Apply
Why did you want to attend RGS? I attended the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) in 2023 for several reasons. For one, it fulfilled a requirement as one of the final classes to complete the Mises graduate program. Additionally, RGS was part of the Mises summer fellowship program, which I was also a part of this year. That said, I wanted to attend RGS because of the unique format it provides for graduate-level reading, lectures, and discussions with the professors and...
Read More »Why More Secession Means Lower Taxes and More Trade
[This article is Chapter 9 of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.] When we hear of political movements in favor of decentralization and secession, the word “nationalist” is often used to describe them. We have seen the word used in both the Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, and in the case of Brexit. Often the term is intended to be pejorative. When used pejoratively—as by the critics of Brexit—the...
Read More »Resurrecting the Failed Policy of Rent Control
It certainly isn’t common to find much agreement between the various authors here at the Mises Institute and our favorite metaphorical punching bag: Paul Krugman. But when it comes to the recently resurrected policy corpse of rent control, we have found a common cause. As Krugman noted back in 2000, The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and—among economists, anyway—one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the...
Read More »The Anti-Semitism Controversy on College Campuses Is the Direct Result of Identity Politics
Anyone following the news knows that after a bruising congressional hearing on antisemitism on elite college campuses knows that Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, recently lost their jobs. while the president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is under fire. While the issue is being framed as these presidents permitting (and sometimes encouraging) antisemitism on campus, the real issue is...
Read More »What an Old Coin Collection Tells Us about Money from the Past
A coin collection can tell a lot about this nation's monetary history, and especially what happened nearly 60 years ago after the government debased U.S. coinage. This history is not having a happy ending. Original Article: What an Old Coin Collection Tells Us about Money from the Past [embedded content] Tags:...
Read More »The Escalating Tensions in the Red Sea Are a Bad Omen
On New Year’s Eve, US Navy helicopters in the Red Sea engaged and sank three boats belonging to Yemen’s Houthis, killing ten. According to US Central Command, the boats were attacking a container ship and fired on the helicopters as they responded to the ship’s distress call. The encounter represents a significant escalation that risks forcing a whole new war on the American public and the Middle East. The Red Sea region has become one of the world’s most volatile...
Read More »Mises and Popper on Action
Many years ago, in “The Communist Road to Self-Enslavement” (included in After the Open Society, a collection of Karl Popper’s papers edited by Jeremy Shearmur), I discovered the following sentence: “Like myself, [Ludwig von Mises] appreciated that there was some common ground, and he knew that I had accepted his most fundamental theorems and that I greatly admired him for these.” As I respect both Popper and Mises as great thinkers, although thinkers who had...
Read More »Good Logic Prevents Bad Regulation
Much onerous and harmful government regulation can be prevented by the application of well-known and well-understood principles of logic. I will use the recent regulations placed upon Americans in response to the so-called pandemic. I refer to the panoply of regulations that government enacted starting in 2020 as the covid control program. Application of proper logic would have eliminated the debate over the possible effectiveness of the regulations by allowing the...
Read More »The Real Meaning of Inflation and Deflation
[Excerpted from Chapter 17 of Human Action.] The services money renders are conditioned by the height of its purchasing power. Nobody wants to have in his cash holding a definite number of pieces of money or a definite weight of money; he wants to keep a cash holding of a definite amount of purchasing power. As the operation of the market tends to determine the final state of money's purchasing power at a height at which the supply of and the demand for money...
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