Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

In this week’s column, I’d like to raise two questions suggested by David Beito’s excellent book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, which I reviewed last week. First, how can it be that Franklin Roosevelt has acquired a reputation among leftist historians as a champion of liberty, with his internment of Japanese Americans during World War II regarded as an aberration, in the face of the manifold violations of civil liberties that occurred during his...

As the libertarian anarchocapitalist Javier Milei ascends to the Argentinian presidency, the parting of the ominous clouds of socialism has brought about the rising sun of libertarianism on the South American continent. The Argentine legislative system, consisting of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, is designed to bolster democratic governance and accountability. However, its inherent structure often leads to impasses, particularly with contentious reforms....

The Fed's Federal Open Market Committee released the minutes to its December meeting yesterday, and the minutes further strengthen the view held by many Wall Street investors and observers that the Fed plans to implement rate cuts by the middle of 2024. Specifically, the most recent Fed survey of market participants "suggested that the first reduction in the policy rate would occur in June."  This contrasts only slightly with the FOMC members themselves, who, in...

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...

While zoning laws do not explain all homelessness in this country, they help make housing less affordable, putting more people on the streets who no longer can pay for a place to live. Original Article: Zoning Laws: Wolves in Sheep's Clothing [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

The Bill of Rights turns 232 years old today. Adopted in 1791 as a consolation prize for the Anti-Federalists,  it has been the most important part of American legal history since the 18th century. Original Article: The Bill of Rights: The Only Good Part of the Constitution [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter...

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:...

​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...

[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...

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...