Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

One of President Biden’s first executive actions was to declare January 27 “Climate Day.” This ad hoc holiday provided an opportunity for his administration to celebrate the latest rationale for economic central planning. The day’s festivities began with three executive orders on climate change, science, and technology. In his remarks, Biden bundled his environmental agenda with a jobs program, along with a broader policy to address social inequality and...

On the fourteenth of October 2020, Antal E. Fekete, the Hungarian-Canadian economist who saw himself as a monetary theorist following the tradition of Carl Menger, died in Budapest. Behind him was an eventful and fruitful life which was quite typical of the crazy last century. His experiences eventually filled Fekete with dark forebodings for the current century. We can only hope that this crazy year won’t become characteristic of an entire era, as his year of birth...

Bob discusses three separate items all related to nonviolence: (1) Gene Sharp’s work, (2) Bob’s old dream of how to topple a tyrant, and (3) the winners of the Louis CK contest. Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: Gene Sharp’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy The trailer for the documentary “How to Start a Revolution” Sharp’s list of 198 methods of nonviolent action The original Louis CK clip that inspired Bob’s contest For more information,...

The economic analysis of repudiation applies to the debt of all levels of government and to all countries. The central question is not how big the government is or how much it owes, but rather whether the debt is funded by taxes. Original Article: “The Economics and Ethics of Government Default, Part II” In the first installment of this series on government default, we examined the ethical status of the public debt and debt repudiation. Since the debt represents...

The GameStop saga—can we call it an insurrection?—wants easy heroes and villains. Both are available. The populist version of the story goes like this: a few thousand angry gamers, colluding via the now infamous WallStreetBets subreddit, brought at least one powerful hedge fund to its knees. Melvin Capital and other short sellers, completely blindsided, lost a reported $5 billion in what must have seemed like a sure-bet opportunity for their model of vulture...

Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss five reasons why Rothbard’s work is so memorable. From his fearlessness in the face of opposition, to his commitment to peace and decency, Rothbard provides us with a model of principled scholarship. Additional Resources “Nations by Consent”: Mises.org/RR_54_02 Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays: Mises.org/RR_54_03 “A Strategy for the Right”: Mises.org/RR_54_04 A History of Money and Banking in the...

In many school districts across the nation, public school teachers still don’t want to go back to work. Private sector workers have long been hard at work in kitchens, at construction sites, and in hardware and grocery stores. Meanwhile, from Seattle, to Los Angeles, and to Berkeley, California, Teachers’ Union representatives insist they simply can’t be expected to perform the on-site work in the expensive facilities that the taxpayers have long been paying for....

A gentleman who does work for us sent me a text recently saying the price of his supplies has increased 20 percent, so he wants to increase his monthly fee 10 percent. It was a nice way to ask, and I said sure, especially given that he’s willing to take a haircut on his labor to make the increase more palatable. Chairman Jerome Powell would be happy to hear this story, as the Federal Reserve prints mightily to push the CPI (Consumer Price Index) to 2 percent and...

[These edited extracts, from an interview in the February 1973 issue of Reason magazine, first ran in the June 1999 issue of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report.] Q: Why, in your view, is isolationism an essential tenet of libertarian foreign policy? A: The libertarian position, generally, is to minimize state power as much as possible, down to zero, and isolationism is the full expression in foreign affairs of the domestic objective of whittling down state power. In other...

The corona crisis has intensified the discussion about the zombification of the economy; enterprises have become more dependent on government bailouts, loans, subsidies, short-time working benefits, and loans from central banks. Governments around the world claim the measures to be only temporary. Yet Japan’s experience suggests that the reliance of enterprises on public support can continue in one form or another. Japan’s enterprises have long relied on the state...