Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

There is a renewed interest in the West Indian colonies' relevance to the British industrial revolution and the subsequent economic transformations that substantially altered Western society's fortunes. This literature has been provoked by the urge to challenge earlier interpretations that underestimate colonies' value to Western countries by showing how interconnected global economies were. Colonies were expensive for Britain, and economists contend that there would...

Nearly a year ago, former New York Times Journalist Alex Berenson was permanently banned from Twitter for writing the following lines about the Covid shot: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it—at best—as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” From the beginning of the Covid hysteria, we followed...

In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick has a chapter named “The Tale of the Slave” in which he explains the nine phases from the most restrictive to more liberating states of slavery. He writes that even though enslaved people have certain forms of self-rule, they are still enslaved. He asks: “Which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?” Nozick’s question highlights that there is no difference between people under...

When conservatives applaud unlimited war spending, they not only harm our economy and body politic, but they give the Left a powerful talking point. Original Article: “War Spending Gives MMTers and the Left a Strong Talking Point” Time and time again, prowar spending concedes one of the Left’s most convincing points. As Assal Rad tweeted recently, we will have sent $54,000,000,000 to Ukraine in less than 4 months. “How will we pay for it” never seems to apply to...

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.] In the early 1950s, Mises’s NYU seminar dealt increasingly with epistemological questions. As he said to Ludwig Lachmann, he felt that the analysis of epistemological problems would be the number one task in the social sciences in the coming years.1 It was the topic of his last two monographs: Theory and History (1957) and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962). The...

Congress enjoys exorbitant political privilege in the form of cheap deficit spending—but it may soon come to an end. Original Article: “Rising Interest Rates May Blow Up the Federal Budget” In fiscal year 2020, at the height of covid stimulus mania, Congress managed to spend nearly twice what the federal government raised in taxes. Yet in 2021, with Treasury debt piled sky high and spilling over $30 trillion, Congress was able to service this gargantuan...

In the recent Wall Street Journal article “Inflation Surge Earns Monetarism Another Look,” Greg Ip writes that a recent surge in inflation is not likely to bring authorities to reembrace monetarism. According to Ip, money supply had a poor record of predicting US inflation because of conceptual and definitional problems that haven’t gone away. The head of the monetarist school, the late Milton Friedman, held that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary...

Systemic debt and deficit spending are intrinsic features of today’s economic system. Unlike classical economics, where markets play the leading role and governments the supporting one, the existing economic model, driven by Keynesian theory, has inverted the roles. Keynesian economics, like other statist economic theories, is distrustful of (free) markets, thus making the state, an inherently bureaucratic and coercive institution, the captain of economic and social...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a historic decision, upholding the highest principle of a republic. A republic is born through freedom of association in the same manner as individuals band together to form a family, families band together to make a community, and communities band together to make a society. In an ideal situation of law-based governance, the law givers and the law abiders must be the same, as it is only then that voluntary subservience to the law...

The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent recessions that people blamed on the lack of central banking. Not surprisingly, the post-Fed recessions have been worse. Original Article: “How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now” With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency...