Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

The empirical evidence shows that neither minimum wages or welfare reduce poverty. In fact, minimum wages tend to increase the cost of living while poverty rates have gone nowhere since the Great Society was introduced. Original Article: “Progressivism’s Failures: From Minimum Wages to the Welfare State” As I write, the Democratic Congress is contemplating various measures designed to alleviate poverty levels in the United States. They include: the doubling of the...

[Chapter 12 of Rothbard’s newly edited and released Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791.] By 1787, the nationalist forces were in a far stronger position than during the Revolutionary War to make their dreams of central power come true. Now, in addition to the reactionary ideologues and financial oligarchs, public creditors, and disgruntled ex-army officers, other groups, some recruited by the depression of the mid-1780s, were ready to be...

If you were to stroll through any typical upper-middle-income American neighborhood in 2021, the odds are very high that you’d observe at least one yard sign exuberantly proclaiming something like this: “In this house, we believe that science is real, love is love, no human is illegal … ” and other banal tautologies. There are usually six or seven examples in this litany, but really, one of the main goals of the yard sign—aside from signaling virtue—can be...

As I write, the Democratic Congress is contemplating various measures designed to alleviate poverty levels in the United States. They include: the doubling of the minimum wage; the expansion of child credits. Let’s review both. The Minimum Wage Hike Congress intends to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. This makes various assumptions: first, that minimum wage workers themselves are indeed poor. This is wrong: they come from families with a median...

Traditionally, Austrian theorists have focused with particular interest on the recurrent cycles of boom and recession that affect our economies and on studying the relationship between these cycles and certain characteristic modifications to the structure of capital-goods stages. Without a doubt, the Austrian theory of economic cycles is one of the most significant and sophisticated analytical contributions of the Austrian School. Its members have managed to explain...

Allen Mendenhall joins the show to expand last week’s discussion on the intellectual state of America. Are we living in a decidedly anti-intellectual age, or has America always been predisposed toward doers over thinkers? Have Americans simply stopped reading books? Have we lost our ability to think deeply, due to the constant distractions of the digital age? And what does the shift away from any shared baseline cultural knowledge mean for our future? Don’t miss this...

Few political movements can boast of success like the firearms movement in the United States. Often overlooked is how before the 1980s there was no concept of licensed, let alone unlicensed, concealed carry in the overwhelming majority of the country. The sole exception was Vermont, which through an idiosyncratic state supreme court decision in 1903 has had unlicensed carry for over a century. “Vermont Carry,” the concept of unlicensed concealed carry, would be the...

Last month, British black studies professor Kehinde Andrews argued that the British Empire was “far worse than the Nazis.” It was a controversial comparison to be sure, but it raises the question: Compared to other expansionist regimes, how bad was the British Empire? A survey of the evidence suggests that the British Empire was relatively less harmful than other imperial efforts, and this is reflected in outcomes—in terms of health and economic growth, among other...

Raghuram Rajan has written a surprising book. Now teaching finance at the University of Chicago, he is an international bureaucrat in good standing, and not a minor one at that; he was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Yet far from calling for an increase in “global governance,” as one might expect from someone with his background, he wants to strengthen the local, “proximate,” community. “If more powers are delegated from the state to the local...

Like nearly all US states, Georgia imposed a stay-at-home order in March 2020 in response to demands from public health officials claiming a stay-at-home order would lessen total deaths from covid-19. But unlike most states, Georgia ended its stay-at-home order after only five weeks, and proceeded to lower other restrictions quickly. The legacy media responded with furious opposition. For example, an article in The Atlantic declared the end of Georgia’s lockdown to...