Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

The immigration debate has polarized societies across the Western world. Objectors assert that the influx of migrants has corroded social relations, and defenders argue that immigrants release a dose of entrepreneurial dynamism. Debates will persist because it’s unlikely that people can be discouraged from migrating to rich countries in the West. Migrants will continuously flock to places like America and Canada, since they provide better opportunities. Besides...

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Money, Method, and the Market Process, a collection of essays selected and edited by Margit von Mises and with an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling.] I The history of civilization is the record of a ceaseless struggle for liberty. Social cooperation under the division of labor is the ultimate and sole source of man’s success in his struggle for survival and his endeavors to improve as much as possible the material...

When asked about price inflation in his Sunday interview with 60 Minutes, President Biden claimed that inflation “was up just an inch…hardly at all.” Biden continued the dishonest tactic of focuses on month-to-month price inflation growth as a means of obscuring the 40-year highs in year-over-year inflation. This strategy may yet work to placate the most ignorant voters, but people who are paying attention know that price inflation continues to soar. Thus, while...

[This article is chapter 1 from Bylund’s new book How to Think about the Economy: A Primer.] Economics is an exciting field. The economics of old sought to uncover how the world works. It showed, or even proved, that there is a natural order to it. There is structure to the apparent chaos. The economy has something of a life of its own: it has a nature. This means not only that we can study it and learn about its ways, but also that we are not free to tamper with it...

Instability in financial markets has brought back the ideas of post-Keynesian school of economics (PK) economist Hyman Minsky. Minsky held that the capitalist economy inherently is unstable, culminating in severe economic crisis, accumulation of debt being the key mechanism pushing the economy toward a crisis. During “good” times, according to Minsky, businesses in profitable areas of the economy are well rewarded for raising their level of debt. The more one borrows...

On February 8, the Japanese yen fell to a 24-year low against the dollar, dropping to 143 yen per dollar. Not much has changed since then with the yen hovering between 142 and 144 per dollar. In September of 2021, one only needed 109 yen to buy a dollar. Overall, the yen has dropped 21 percent against the dollar over the past year, yet Japan’s central bank apparently has no plans to change course. Nor should we expect it to do so.  Japan’s debt load has become so...

In recent years, Congress has attempted to add various new mandates to the Federal Reserve’s mission. In 2020, Democrats introduced the “Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Equity Act.”  Then, in 2021, pundits and politicians were telling us that it’s the Fed’s job to “combat climate change.” These are just the latest efforts to use the enormously powerful central bank to achieve political ends to the liking of elected officials. This is a helpful reminder, of...

Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll Basic Books, 2022; viii + 326 pp. Jacob Soll is a distinguished historian, and Free Market contains much of value, but the book cannot be considered a success, and indeed as it reaches the twentieth century, it becomes a disaster. Even in the parts of the book worth reading, Soll is in the iron grip of a central thesis, one that his historical approach by its nature makes impossible to prove. In some books, discerning...

According to Jordan Peterson, left-wing totalitarians are characterized by an ideology in which group identity is paramount. I will demonstrate that this is a misconception. Historically, socialists have fought against feudalism and capitalism in the name of emancipating the individual from any kind of group or class identity. The totalitarian tendencies of socialist thinking stem from its insistence on using the state as an instrument to destroy all group identities...

Our economic system—the market economy or cap­italism—is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the neces­sity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the con­sumers can afford and are prepared to pay. A busi­ness operation is a manifest failure if the proceeds from the sales do not reimburse the businessman for all he has...