Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Our main text for the Rothbard Graduate Seminar this week is Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy, which contains a systematic treatment of one area of economic theory, interventionism. This represents a departure from past seminars in an important respect. Earlier seminars focused on texts by Mises or Rothbard that addressed a much broader scope of their thought. Previous seminar texts such as Man, Economy and State and Human Action over...

President Joe Biden has unveiled a three-part plan to fight inflation — or at least make people think he is fighting inflation. One part of the plan involves having government agencies “fix” the supply chain problems that have led to shortages of numerous products. Of course, any attempt by the government to solve the supply chain problems (which were caused by prior government interventions such as shutting down the economy for over a year) will not just fail to...

As Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky has quite rightly said, one should not consider the five-thousand-plus sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation as of this writing as sanctions in the normal diplomatic and economic sense. They are a conditional “second front,” a blow aimed at dismantling the Russian economy, the Russian social structure, and the institutional framework in response to the corresponding actions of the Russian authorities, with the...

There is scattered evidence that home prices are finally starting to slow down. But, if the phenomenon is system-wide, we’re still waiting to see the evidence in numbers. Last week, the most recent Case-Shiller national data, for example, showed that home prices in March rose an eye-popping 20 percent, year over year. That’s well in excess of what we saw during the height of the housing bubble leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. That makes nine months in a row...

Tom Woods’ bestseller Meltdown placed the blame for the financial debacle of 2008–09 on the government’s counterfeiter, the Federal Reserve. It was the Fed’s policies that created the problems, although most economists and economic talking heads didn’t see it that way. The Fed’s loose monetary policies funded the meltdown and became the “elephant in the living room” most pundits couldn’t see. Woods was right, of course; putting a monopoly counterfeiter in charge of...

There was a time when the advocates of socialism argued that it would lead man to material abundance, whereas free-market capitalism would lead only to increasing misery and would ultimately collapse under its own internal stresses. You don’t hear that too much these days, and for good reason. A century of empirical evidence has shown the contrary—that the free market leads to increasing wealth and material freedom, while socialism leads us only to poverty, state...

Finland and Sweden’s recent decision to apply for North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership is a major win for the military alliance, but a far more dubious one for these two countries. NATO badly needs a success at this moment, since neither the economic war on Russia nor the conflict in Ukraine seems to be going the West’s way. Whether officially adding two more Nordic countries would have a real military advantage for NATO remains to be seen, but at least it...

It has become a familiar sight over the past decade and a half: a supposedly venerable member of the financial elite tells us with utmost calm that what we think we are seeing isn’t really all that bad. The Fed already knows all about it and has already taken all necessary steps. Further, they are monitoring the situation closely and are ready to make any necessary adjustments with ease and alacrity. Reading the Fed’s meeting minutes and picking through its actual...

If you’ve purchased any airline tickets lately, you’ve probably noticed that prices are up. It’s quite a reversal from the days of covid lockdowns, when airline tickets could be had for half the price of 2019 fares. Or even lower, in many cases. But those days are apparently over, and as Yahoo Finance notes this week: Airline fares soared 18.6% in April, according to the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)…. The jump,...

The current baby formula shortage in the United States is a pressing crisis, and many in the media have been rushing to explain how such a thing could have happened. But on close analysis, it appears to share the same root as virtually every other crisis experienced in the modern world: a government promised benefits without costs. Our political leaders either fail to understand or outright ignore the basic, unavoidable limitation on government action, that no...