Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Last week I discussed a new argument against paternalism in the important book of Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, Escaping Paternalism. Today I’d like to give the other side a chance. Robert H. Frank is an economist at Cornell University, well-regarded for his work on the emotions and usually anxious to stress the flaws of the free market. In his just-published Under the Influence, he offers, among many other things, a defense of high taxes on cigarettes, and this is...

Discussions about the incentive effects of taxes can be misleading. The focus is usually on the tax rates imposed. But one’s incentives are not best measured by tax rates, but by how much value created for others (reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay) is retained by the creator, which I refer to as take-home income. These two variables — tax rates and take-home income — are reciprocal in the sense that the higher the marginal tax rate, the smaller the take-home...

The Fed announced on Thursday it is adding another 83 billion in "in temporary liquidity to financial markets" And, in a development that will surprise no cynic anywhere, the Fed also noted it "may keep adding temporary money to markets for longer than policy makers had expected in September." Specifically, this was another move to shore up and bailout the repo market, which has required the Fed's ongoing revival of quantitative easing (but don't call it...

[This essay is chapter 9 of Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, and Other Essays] It should be no news by this time that intellectuals are fully as subject to the vagaries of fashion as are the hemlines of women’s skirts. Apparently, intellectuals tend to be victims of a herd mentality. Thus, when John Kenneth Galbraith published his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958, every intellectual and his brother was denouncing America as suffering from undue and...

Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external standard that people don’t accept. They claim, however, that accepting the actual preferences people have still leaves room for...

In today’s political discourse, the minimum wage is frequently mentioned by the more progressive members of Congress. On a basic level, raising the minimum wage appears to be a sympathetic policy for low-income wage earners. Often kept out of the conversation, however, are the downstream effects of this proposal. The consensus among economists has always been that a price floor on “low-skilled labor” leads to unemployment “among the very people minimum wage...

Dr. Bob Murphy joins the Human Action Podcast to discuss one of the most important issues of all: how money and credit work in today's society. Jeff Deist recently commissioned Murphy to write a series of articles on money mechanics, an exceedingly important topic for critics of the Fed—and today's podcast serves as an introduction to the project. The articles will be compiled into an e-book, with plenty of graphics to simplify the basic process of money creation in...

It is bad enough that opponents of the free market wrongly blame capitalism for environmental pollution, depressions, and wars. Whatever the failings of their causal theories, at least they are focused on undoubtedly bad things. We have really gone beyond the pale, though, when the market is blamed for something good. Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, does just that in his article. “Let’s Be Less Productive,” which...

On December 29, an armed gunman entered the West Freeway Church of Christ in Texas and shot two members of the congregation. Within six seconds, a third member of the congregation drew a weapon and shot the gunman dead. The events were captured on live-streamed video, with the dramatic events — in the minds of many observers — highlighting the benefits of privately-owned firearms as a defense against armed criminals. Moreover, the gunman, who had a criminal history,...

Most economists are of the view that by means of economic indicators it is possible to identify early signs of an upcoming recession or prosperity. What is the rationale behind this opinion? The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) introduced the economic indicators approach in the 1930s. A research team led by W. C. Mitchell and Arthur F. Burns studied about 487 economic data to ascertain the mystery of the business cycle. According to Mitchell and Burns,...