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...
Read More »Reflections on the Rothbard Graduate Seminar
I had the good fortune of attending the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) twice in succession, during the summers of 2020 and 2021. By that time, I was already quite familiar with the ideas of the Austrian School thanks to the many podcasts and recorded Mises University lectures, among much more, the Mises Institute has made freely available online. However, I likely never would have realized my own understanding of Ludwig von Mises’s economic works was so deficient...
Read More »Privatizing Roads Solves the Problem of Road Closures
While traveling recently, I was stuck in a terrible bout of traffic. Unbeknownst to me, West Virginia University’s fall graduation just ended, and I was caught in the middle of the seemingly endless stream of parents, relatives, and friends who were leaving the ceremony. To deal with this problem, the City of Morgantown closed down lanes and reserved them for exclusive use by graduation attendees. Though the city may have done a fine job handling traffic, this raises...
Read More »When Nationalism Fuels Decentralization and Secession: Lessons from the Cold War
[This article is chapter 6 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Now available at Amazon and in the Mises Store.] During the early 1990s, as the world of the old Soviet Bloc was rapidly falling apart, the economist and historian Murray Rothbard saw it all for what it was: a trend of mass decentralization and secession unfolding before the world’s eyes. The old Warsaw Pact states of Poland, Hungary, and others won...
Read More »Last Day to Give in 2023!
YOUR GIFT WILL HELP US DO MORE IN 2024. With your gift of $25 or more, you will receive a copy of Joe Salerno's The Progressive Road to Socialism. Recurring donors of $10 who give $100 will also receive a copy of The Progressive Road to Socialism and renew their Membership through 2024. DONATE TODAY! [embedded content] Tags:...
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