Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

[Originally published in the Housing Finance International Journal.] The 21st century, only 23 years old, has already had two giant, international housing bubbles. It makes one doubt that we are getting any smarter with experience. Among the countries involved in the second bubble, both the U.S. and Canada fully participated in the newest rampant inflation of house prices. Prices this time reached levels far above those of the last boom peak. In the U.S., the...

Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is not only a best-selling author but also a top advisor to Klaus Schwab, founder and front man of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2018, Harari wrote: “Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.” And, in a 2019 interview, Harari said: Humans today are a hackable animal—an animal that can be hacked. . . . Hacking a person means...

Forty years ago, I was worried. I had had the honor of working with Ludwig von Mises. But, not long after his death, the greatest economist and defender of freedom in the twentieth century was being ignored. Some years before, I had worked for the great Neil McCaffrey at his Arlington House Publishers. One day, I was called into his office and asked, “How’d you like to be Ludwig von Mises’s editor?” I was to correct and bring back into print three of the great man’s...

[This piece is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, to be released January 10, 2023.] This chapter derisively refers to the notorious Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) as the Great Leap Backward. But China’s Great Leap Forward is not the ultimate object of my scorn. That scorn is reserved for the contemporary project conducted by people, who, if they knew anything about history, or cared about its...

As we enter the holiday season stock owners have been the big losers of 2022, but jobs are still plentiful and nominal wages are rising rapidly. The Wall Street Journal reports “Stiff Demand Drives Gains in Jobs, Wages” (December 4). Faced with a stagnant stock market, nothing bolsters confidence more than the plethora of job openings, seemingly everywhere, and for all types of jobs. The number of job openings is a statistic worth paying attention to as a gauge of...

We think of thieves as conducting their work when no one is looking, such as breaking into a house while the owners are away. But the most successful thieves have done their stealing in plain sight, on a grand scale, while the owners were home and often with their tacit approval, though with sleights of hand that few are able to detect. Such a theft occurred when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913. A central bank such as the...

Where did this thing called the Fed come from? Murray Rothbard has the answer here — in phenomenal detail that will make your head spin. In one extended essay, one that reads like a detective story, he has put together the most comprehensive and fascinating account based on a century's accumulation of scholarship. The conclusion is that the Fed did not originate as a policy response to national need. It wasn't erected for any of its stated purposes. It was founded by...

While Christians the world over look to the celebration as a way to remember the incarnation of Christ, some dismiss it as a Christianized version of the ancient Rome’s Saturnalia. Whatever one’s view happens to be, I humbly suggest that it ought to be used by Christians and non-Christians alike as a reflection upon a collision of two kingdoms and two forms of rule. One that makes the way for life, and the other for misery, suffering, and death. If the celebration of...

During the 1980s, millions of American children pored over the Toys 'R' Us catalog, daydreaming about what toys we hoped to receive in a few weeks on Christmas morning. After all, by the mid twentieth century, Christmas—for countless middle-class households with children— had become more or less synonymous with an enormous number of gifts for children in the form of toys and games. Barbie playsets and a myriad of action figures were routinely advertised during...

In his 1922 book on socialism, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, Ludwig von Mises attributes socialism’s attractiveness to the claim that Marx’s doctrine would be both ethical and scientific. In truth, however, Marxism represents a metaphysical dogma that promises an earthly paradise yet threatens civilization itself. Thesis of the Inevitability of Socialism Marxism explains that immoral capitalist economies will necessarily be replaced by socialist systems that meet higher...