The Libertarian Party was assembled in 1971 and has proven throughout its history to be a resoundingly-unsuccessful third-party venture in American politics. While libertarians are outspoken in their advocacy for individual liberties, limited government, and free markets, their presidential candidates have proven largely unsuccessful throughout history.Why have they not experienced greater success in the face of confronting what has become two ideological extremes?...
Read More »The Feds’ Runaway Deficits Are Here to Stay
Watch the video version of this article on X/Twitter. The latest monthly report on taxes and spending from the Treasury Department shows that in July, the federal deficit was $244 billion, or nearly one quarter of a trillion dollars.In spite of the fact that the US government managed to collect $330 billion in taxes in July, they also managed to spend $574 billion.Through the end of July this fiscal year, the feds racked up a deficit of a little over 1.5 trillion...
Read More »The New Minimum Wage Increase in Nigeria is a Pyrrhic Victory for Organized Labor
While organized labor across Nigeria is currently jubilant over their recent win in obtaining a minimum wage increase by fiat, every student of praxeology in Nigeria receives this news with mixed feelings and the utmost reservation, because we are cognizant of the outcomes which inevitably follow from such interventions in the free market.Earlier in May 2024, organized labor (in both public and private sector)—under the auspices of the Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC)...
Read More »Greedflation and Debtflation are Nonsense
Popular discussions of inflation and the economy have produced more heat than light, if not heat and darkness. President Biden has made multiple remarks on his record, which taken singly are each incorrect. Taken together, Biden’s remarks on Bidenomics are incoherent.Biden claims that his main fiscal stimulus policy, the American Recovery Plan delivered record reductions in unemployment without causing inflation. Biden has insisted that corporate greed (Greedflation)...
Read More »John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash, 1929: A Retrospective
The New Deal has been a key driver behind how the Democratic Party justified its hold on political power in the United States. The precursor to the New Deal was the Great Depression, which, in the minds of many Americans, was triggered by the stock market crash in late 1929.However, is the Democratic memory of the crash and Depression thereafter accurate? Did those events justify the policies Democrats pursued through the New Deal? One way to explore these questions...
Read More »The Only Type of Democracy that Actually Works
What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....
Read More »Tax the Rich? Not a good idea
In the popular book “The Trading Game,” British author Gary Stevenson recounts his journey as a trader at a major U.S. bank in London. He has made lofty claims about his trading career and used it as a springboard for his successful YouTube channel, “Garys Economics.”A tailwind to his popularity is that he holds many fashionable views — for example, that money “is a token,” that printing money is akin to creating wealth, and that capitalism is the problem. He holds...
Read More »Republicans declare war on the American economy
The 2024 Republican National Convention will be remembered for the raw emotions evoked by an attempted assassination the preceding weekend of its presidential nominee Donald Trump and for the now mostly Trumpified Republicans posing as the populist champions of American workers against the elitist Democrats.This convention, however, should be remembered for another reason too. It marks the entrenchment of an organized “national conservative” movement within the party...
Read More »Presenting the moral case for capitalism
There is a widespread perception that capitalism is a system designed to encourage greed, envy, selfishness, and other moral failings to flourish. Popular writing on capitalism, notably Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” recognizes the importance of addressing the moral case for capitalism. No economic system, no matter how efficient and productive, can flourish if it is widely regarded as the root of all evil. Given that the science of economics is...
Read More »Techno Unemployment
What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....
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