In discussing the Mises Institute’s June 24th full-page Wall Street Journal ad entitled “Who Needs the Fed?” on talk radio recently most of the interviewers naturally expressed skepticism over whether the Fed could ever actually be abolished and a gold-and-silver standard reinstituted. It reminded me of something Murray Rothbard said about this. If the government had monopolized say, shoe production a hundred years ago and someone suggested the privatization of shoe...
Read More »Biden’s 5% cap on apartment rents: Washington’s latest economic folly
Recently, the Biden administration introduced plans to limit increases in apartment rents to 5% annually. Far from a straightforward cap, this plan contains various nuances, which I will explain below. Nevertheless, the basic fraud on display here is twofold.First, the state continues to ignore private property rights while manipulating markets with price controls – an attempt to commandeer the market’s fundamental role of price discovery and place it in the hands of...
Read More »The cost of a hoax
The cost of a hoaxThe scandal surrounding Canada’s Kamloops Indian Residential School (1890-1969, British Columbia) is an ultracautionary tale about the damage inflicted by self-interested politicians and activists, backed by a media that toes the line. The 2021 scandal sprang from the alleged discovery of 215 graves of indigenous children. They were said to have died under suspicious circumstances at the Catholic-run school and then buried in unmarked graves behind...
Read More »The degrowth movement is antihuman, and its advocates are fine with that
The assimilation of degrowth ideas into the mainstream portends dire consequences for economic well-being. Degrowth is trumpeted as the solution to averting a climate catastrophe, but it will reverse the economic fortunes of practitioners. Sustained economic growth became the norm recently in history, and surely most people don’t want a return to a preindustrial era with episodic growth and lower living standards. The typical person today would be reluctant to trade...
Read More »‘Net zero’ and Keynesian ‘stimulus’ are making us poorer
If you read the latest OECD publication, “Employment Outlook 2024: The Net Zero Transition and the Labour Market,” you would imagine that the world has not gone through the largest monetary and fiscal stimulus in decades.The results are so poor, they are embarrassing. Furthermore, the report illustrates the impoverishment of citizens and subtly suggests that achieving the net zero goal will present an even greater challenge. Translation: You will be even...
Read More »Does the Fed Push Interest Rates Down? History Says Yes
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Jason Purcell joins Bob to discuss his historical analysis of yield curves (in both UK and US) going back to the 1870s, which shows that central banks do indeed manipulate short-term interest rates. [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter
Read More »What Was Missing at NatCon 2024
National Conservatives are a growing movement on the political right. They are largely united by their belief in the failings of liberalism, in protectionist trade policy, a halt to mass migration, and a more Christianized nation. The attendees of this year’s conference, hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation, focused on many topics: free trade, their desire to decouple from China, weaponization of government, bureaucracy in government, and even the building of...
Read More »The 1866 civil rights revolution
The phrase “equality of opportunity” is expressed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a nondiscrimination principle. There has been much debate on whether the nondiscrimination principle is a formal right to equality before the law, reflecting the principle that everyone has a right not to be discriminated against, or whether it is a substantive right vested in specified groups (e.g., blacks or women) to give them special legal protection that members of other groups...
Read More »Why Economic Inequality Is a Good Thing
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....
Read More »An Austrian contribution to the praxeology of nature conservation
Without human intervention, there would be no nature conservation, only the natural struggle for species survival through evolution and adaptation. Humans actively protect and shape their surroundings, making nature conservation a practically anthropocentric concept.The conservation of natural elements involves counteracting undesirable changes to those elements and their conditioning environment. Broadly, nature protection includes activities aimed at restoring...
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