Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

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....

As the saying goes, “Personnel is Policy.” President Trump learned this the hard way, depending heavily on the very Washington, D.C. swamp creatures whose swamp he sought to drain. George W. Bush, having scant foreign policy experience himself, leaned heavily on a stable of neoconservative advisors, who had long pressed for another war with Iraq. What might a Kamala Harris victory in November portend for US foreign policy? Harris’s statements and advisors tell the...

In 301 AD, Roman emperor Diocletian implemented price ceilings on over 1,200 goods. The silver coinage had been debased over the past 250 years, and the citizens were understandably unhappy about high prices. In 50 AD, each denarius had about 3.9 grams of silver, but then the empire debased the coins, sometimes in dramatic steps and sometimes more slowly. By 125 AD, the coins had less than 3 grams of silver. By 200 AD, it was less than 2 grams. There was another...

Democrats didn’t even bother to wait for their 2024 National Convention in Chicago to appoint their replacement presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, and to tout the new economic planks to be added to the party’s platform. In her August 16th speech on the economy, she pledged her loyalty to the party’s current interventionist agenda, professing that the Biden regime’s policies have supposedly been good for the middle class and that she will continue to support...

Praxeological Ethics: An Inquiry into the Nature and Foundation of Ethicsby J.W. Rich; (Independently published, 2024, 153)I met J.W. Rich when he was a student last month at Mises University, and he mentioned to me that he was working on a book about praxeological ethics. He has now sent me the book, and it is very impressive indeed. It is remarkable in its scope, and in what follows I’ll indicate some points of the many insightful points in the book as well as a...

The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity,” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of...

A July poll shows that a majority of the American public does not support sending U.S. troops to defend Taiwan or Ukraine, sentiment that lines up with findings from other recent surveys on these heated subjects, which suggests that Americans appear to be warming to restraint and non-interventionism in international affairs.Indeed, another poll, conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in February found that a majority of Americans (56%) do not believe that...

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference at the annual Jackson Hole economic conference today, and he all but said that a September cut to the federal funds rate is a done deal: “The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear.”Naturally he threw in the usual propaganda phrases about how the Fed is data driven. He continues: “the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of...

“Having to manage a complex home produces a deadweight loss to both society and the individual.” - John Tamny and Jack Ryan (2024)A man’s home is his castle, says the old adage, but John Tamny and Jack Ryan thumb their nose at the sacred “American Dream” of home ownership in their new book Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home. They are not the first to do so—the great Florence King derided it often and with pleasure—yet, to still do so, makes this book a rare...

No American politician running for office wants to talk about taxes—unless, of course, it’s to promise a tax cut. No Misesian views taxes with anything but suspicion, and Mises himself held some principled views on taxes:Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the...