Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Last week, President Joe Biden and a number of top American and European officials met in Normandy to attend a ceremony marking the eightieth anniversary of the D-day invasion. In a pair of speeches, Biden recounted the operation that he said marked the beginning of the “great crusade to liberate Europe from tyranny” before drawing a direct connection to where things stand with the war in Ukraine.Biden called Russian president Vladamir Putin a tyrant who invaded...

In September 2024, undergraduate students will have an opportunity to participate in the Fall Mises Book Club, a program that promotes deep reading in Austrian economics.The reading for this book club will be Murray Rothbard’s Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. This year marks its 50th anniversary.Rothbard smashes myth after myth in this collection of essays. In the first essay, Rothbard questions the goals of egalitarianism...

In recent days, we have had brought home to us what “show trials” are like. They are not confined to Soviet Russia and it satellite countries during the Cold War but are a very present reality to us in America today. Political opponents of Donald Trump charged him with felonies for acts that were entirely legal. The judge in the case was a political opponent of Trump and worked artfully to prevent the trial jury from hearing testimony that would have exposed the...

Robert Reich has embarked on an intellectual journey- he intends to debunk 10 economic myths. The first of these 10 supposed myths is the idea that economics is a value free objective science. Reich offers a brief history lesson, in which he describes how Adam Smith developed economics as a branch of moral philosophy . Patrick Carroll has pointed out that Reich’s argument entails a fallacious appeal to tradition. Reich’s reference to Adam Smith is also argument by...

The individual’s natural right to life antedates the state apparatus.Let us not commit the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and in so doing, avoiding reality—the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.When Americans reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they habitually extol the virtue of Pax Americana, but never the horrors of it. Having shaped the annals of the past, regime historians, naturally, speak a...

Price discovery in commercial real estate, which had been frozen while sellers insisted on prices from the good ol’ ZIRP days, is starting to thaw. Real Estate giant Related Companies has unloaded the property at 321 W. 44th St., New York, New York for less than $50 million, reports Bloomberg. Not only is that a 67% discount from the nearly $153 million that Related Fund Management paid for it in 2018, but the lenders including Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce...

American Compass, a think tank promoting a conservatism lacking even a rhetorical commitment to free markets, recently called for Republicans to support tax increases. The organization claims a GOP embrace of higher taxes will enable the uniparty’s left (Democratic) and right (Republican) wings to create a deficit reduction plan balancing tax increase with spending cuts.American Compass is correct that both parties need to prioritize deficit reduction. The 35...

An oft cited reason given for the need for the state is that it is the only means through which the poor can access sufficient welfare to relieve them from the harsh realities that can accompany their circumstances. Yet despite the promises made over many decades and the huge sums spent on state welfare programs, it is hardly clear that the needs of the poor have been sufficiently met, especially given the constant outcry for more resources and better programs. If it...

When socialist schemes fail, as they inevitably do, our attention is immediately drawn away from the destruction they cause to the “good intentions” behind the schemes. They meant well. Their good intentions override their disastrous results. One reason why good intentions are important to both sides of the political divide is that good intentions play well to voters. A good example of this is the national debt crisis in the United States. The economist Samuel...

According to a new report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, the US economy added 272,000 jobs during May while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.0 percent. As has been repeatedly the case over the past year, the latest monthly job-growth number was described as a “blowout” or “hot” number by major media outlets like CNN. As is typical in the good-news-is-bad-news view on Wall Street, the Dow fell on Friday out of fear that the...