Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

The US Bureau of Labor statistics released new Consumer Price Index inflation estimates this morning, and the official numbers for June 2022 show that price inflation has risen to 9.1 percent year over year. That’s the biggest number since November 1981, when the price growth measure hit 9.6 percent year over year. The month-over-month measure surged as well, with the CPI measure hitting 1.4 percent. That’s the highest month-over-month growth since March 1980, when...

If there is a mantra among progressive American political and media elites, it would be “our democracy,” usually preceded by what they believe to be a threat from the Right. For example, progressives deemed the recent reversal of Roe “a threat to our democracy” because it removed laws regulating abortion from Supreme Court jurisdiction and returned the issue to democratically elected legislatures. It would seem inconsistent to invoke the democratic electoral process...

In January 1956, the iconoclastic leftist American poet Allen Ginsberg wrote “America,” a prose poem that laments the state of the country and the poet’s place in it. “America” was included in the short poetry collection entitled Howl, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Publishers in November of the same year. In 1957, Howl became a cause célèbre as the centerpiece of People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an obscenity trial that...

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...