The passage of an income tax in the early twentieth century was an enormous shift toward a far more centralized and powerful US state. Original Article: "The Income Tax: Lessons from the Sixteenth Amendment" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter
Read More »Prevent Future Losses Like East Palestine by Reducing Regulation and Empowering Torts
To prevent rail accidents like the one in East Palestine, dial back government regulation and allow the tort system to work. Original Article: "Prevent Future Losses Like East Palestine by Reducing Regulation and Empowering Torts" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter
Read More »Was Japanese Colonialism the Engine of Later Prosperity for Korea and Taiwan? Probably Not
Mainstream historians attribute the postwar economic success of South Korea and Taiwan to the legacy of Japanese colonialism. The Japanese are credited with providing new technologies, critical infrastructure, and an efficient state that enabled industrial progress in South Korea and Taiwan. Both Taiwan and Korea benefitted from the successful adoption of Japanese technologies and recorded industrial growth under imperial rule. Moreover, during 1913–38, Taiwan and...
Read More »Disinformation and the State: The Aptly Named RESTRICT Act
Federal laws with acronyms are usually bad news. (Think the USA PATRIOT Act.) The RESTRICT Act is yet another Orwellian proposal in which the federal government assumes ignorance is strength. Original Article: "Disinformation and the State: The Aptly Named RESTRICT Act" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter
Read More »Lincoln’s Main Target Was “Anarchy” and Secession, Not Slavery
Once the Southern states accepted the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln was entirely content for the old Southern elites to resume their positions of power and for many blacks to continue in a condition little better than bondage. Original Article: "Lincoln's Main Target Was "Anarchy" and Secession, Not Slavery" [embedded content]...
Read More »A Pyrrhic End to 130 Years of Vicious Bad Money and Banking Crises
The current banking crises have deep roots in US financial history. Monetary authorities have engaged in inflationary behavior for more than a hundred years. Original Article: "A Pyrrhic End to 130 Years of Vicious Bad Money and Banking Crises" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter
Read More »Bank Reserves
Bank reserves are seldom mentioned except in cases of bank runs. The other possible mention is all the interest money the Fed pays to banks simply for holding reserves. Mark explains the role of bank reserves in the current "system" and gives a brief explanation of why the Austrian view is better and actually gets the job done. Be sure to follow Minor Issues at Mises.org/MinorIssues. [embedded content]...
Read More »Argentina Sleepwalks into Hyperinflation (Yet Again)
The Argentine peso has lost half its value in one year. Both the official and parallel exchange rates with the US dollar and the Mexican peso have doubled in one year. Consumer prices have doubled in one year. The quantity of Argentine pesos has doubled in one year. All the rates at which these variables are increasing have also doubled in one year. Expecting everything to double again in half a year is now a conservative projection. Argentina was the richest country...
Read More »The Progressive Era and the Family
[Originally from Joseph R. Peden and Fred R. Glahe, eds., The American Family and the State (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1986).] While the "Progressive Era" used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an era in which the entire American polity—from economics to urban...
Read More »A Credit Crunch Is Inevitable
Federal Reserve data shows $98 billion of deposits left the banking system in the week after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Most of the money went to money-market funds, as the Bloomberg data shows that assets in this class rose by $121 billion in the same period. The data shows the challenges of the banking system in the middle of a confidence crisis. However, as many analysts point out, this is not necessarily the main factor that dictates the risk of a credit...
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