Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Government-mandated money in the form of legal tender is a historical anomaly. For much of mankind’s history private monies and quasi monies competed alongside each other. Now, again, a new era of private money competition is resurging and reshaping our world. Money, finance, and banking are currently experiencing the “Great Unbundling.” Value chains within finance are being broken up across the spectrum. Customers or users are no longer obtaining their money...

In the wake of the extreme price explosion in GameStop stock, driven in large part by the subreddit WallStreetBets on Reddit, there is naturally a great deal of talk about “market manipulation” and related concerns. Many people are saying that hedge funds manipulate markets. Others are saying that the rich and powerful are now upset because “manipulation has been democratized.” The Secruities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now monitoring the situation. Nancy Pelosi...

Within a day of the inauguration, the Biden administration issues a bevy of new executive orders designed to please a variety of the Democratic Party’s core special-interest groups. Among these was an executive order curtailing oil and gas leasing on federal and tribal lands. But a problem quickly presented itself: many tribes earn a significant amount of income through oil and gas drilling on their lands. These operations also provide jobs for tribal members. The...

[This is the fourth lecture from Mises’s “Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow“] If the supply of caviar were as plentiful as the supply of potatoes, the price of caviar—that is, the exchange ratio between caviar and money or caviar and other commodities—would change considerably. In that case, one could obtain caviar at a much smaller sacrifice than is required today. Likewise, if the quantity of money is increased, the purchasing power of the monetary...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]FBI agents across the nation are tracking down and arresting Trump supporters who walked into the US Capitol during the January 6 protest that turned into a brawl. Scores of protestors have already been charged with unlawful entry—“knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority.”

Should skepticism of the 2020 election, fueled by a new administration’s actions, finally convince 50+ million Trump supporters that the barbarians in the Beltway do not represent him, then Trump’s presidency will be—despite his own actions—the disruption that America’s elites truly feared. Original Article: Well, they finally got Donald Trump. But he sure scared the bejesus out of them. It took a massive five-year campaign of hysteria, of fear and hate,...

On January 19 it was announced that Joe Biden planned to nominate Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania (PA) secretary of health, for the position of assistant secretary of health in the Department of Health and Human Services. This is potentially good news for Pennsylvanians, who will finally be rid of her after having had to endure her disastrous covid lockdowns and restrictions for nearly a year, but is likely bad news for the rest of the country. News coverage of...

Paraphrasing the late Murray Rothbard, the “two party” system in America during the twentieth century worked something like this: Democrats engineered the Great Leaps Forward, and Republicans consolidated the gains. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson were the transformative presidents; Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan offered only rhetoric and weak tea compromises. In politics, being for something always beats being against something, and Republicans were never much...

“Trauma-informed justice” has percolated in academia and activism for decades. It is now knocking on the door of local police departments to demand changes that could upend the basics of how people relate to law enforcement. The approach converts the police into social workers or therapists and erases the due process upon which traditional Western justice hinges. It also increases the odds of wrongful convictions. Trauma-informed justice—sometimes called...

Although advocates for covid-19 lockdowns continue to insist that they save lives, actual experience keeps suggesting otherwise. On a national level, just eyeballing the data makes this clear. Countries that have implemented harsh lockdowns shouldn’t expect to have comparatively lower numbers of covid-19 deaths per million. In Italy and the United Kingdom, for example, where lockdowns have been repeatedly imposed, death totals per million remain among the worst in...