Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

That Americans are in the throes of a crisis in democracy has become a commonplace refrain of late. I have noticed that almost all such commentary treats political democracy, implicitly or explicitly, as the ideal. Yet in truth it is a seriously flawed ideal. In fact, as F. A. Hayek noted years ago, all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before…unlimited democracy…the problem today. Perhaps the most blatant evidence against the idea that...

At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bob Prince, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, attracted attention when he suggested in a news interview that the boom and bust cycle as we have come to know it in the last decades may have ended. This viewpoint may well have been encouraged by the fact that the latest economic upswing (“boom”) has been going for around a decade and that an end is not in sight as suggested by incoming macro- and...

The money supply growth rate rose in December slowed after a November surge of nearly six percent. During December 2019, year-over-year growth in the money supply was at 5.53 percent. That’s down from November’s rate of 5.9 percent, but was up from December 2018’s rate of 3.90 percent. The increase in money-supply growth in December continues a sizable reversal of the trend we saw for most of 2019. In August, the growth rate hit a 120-month low, falling to the...

That there are inherent benefits in diversity is a common article of faith in our democratic/populist times. We hear it in and about universities, businesses, politics, entertainment, etc. Typically, though, we hear about it in terms of forcing more diversity on those whose diversity in a particular dimension doesn’t measure up to someone else’s arbitrary standard. However, high-volume discussions on the topic often proceed as if diversity was the relevant end...

TOM WOODS: This is the Tom Woods Show, and today I welcome Jeff Deist. Everybody wants to know the sheer nuts and bolts of how somebody becomes Ron Paul’s chief of staff. I’ll tell a little story most people don’t know. About ten years ago, Dr. Paul was approached about doing an autobiography; he would have gotten a huge advance. There was big demand for it! But he just couldn’t believe people were interested in the details of his life. His heart wasn’t in it, so he...

The US Senate is increasingly targeted by left-wing think tanks and legislators for the fact it is based on “voter inequality.” According to critics, the Senate ensures small states are “overrepresented,“and the body favors voters in smaller and more sparsely populated states. In contrast,  reformers  hold up the concept of “one man, one vote” as an ideal and a solution. “One man, one vote” is not a clearly defined concept, but it is often used to oppose legislative...

In most times and places, crime tends to be a highly localized phenomenon. I have covered this for Mises.org at the national level, pointing out that homicide rates in, say, the Mountain West and New England are far lower than homicide rates in the Great Lakes region or the South. Gun-control laws clearly don’t explain these differences, since many places with rock-bottom homicide rates such as Idaho and Maine also have few controls on private gun ownership. Thus,...

Money, Inflation, and Business Cycles: The Cantillon Effect and the Economy by Arkadiusz Sieroń Abingdon: Routledge, 2019 x + 162 pp. Abstract: Austrian economists hold that money matters a great deal in concrete terms in the immediate short run and has permanent long-run effects. Sierońs book investigates the Cantillon effect, which indicates that money is not neutral because inevitabily it is injected unevenly, creating economic distortions. These distortions are...

“Luck egalitarianism” is a philosophical fad, and in the past I have had some characteristically unkind things to say about it. I’d like today to discuss a new argument that concerns luck and government. The economist Robert H. Frank says in Under the Influence, Because successful people often fail to appreciate the importance of seemingly minor random events in life, they tend to develop an exaggerated sense of entitlement to the enormous material rewards they...

In 1971, Isaac Asimov wrote an extraordinary novel, The Gods Themselves, about a machine that generates unlimited energy for free, defying the fundamental economic principle known as scarcity. It is later learned that the Electron Pump is originating from a hole in space that connects parallel universes. Doomsday is nigh as it is discovered that galaxies will soon be destroyed and that the sun will metastasize into a supernova. The crux of the story is comparable to...