Sound money advocate and Conservative Party MP for Wycombe Steve Baker lost his seat in the general election that took place on 4th July–curious timing for a sitting Prime Minister to have called an election his party was always near-certain to lose. As Americans were celebrating Independence Day, the remnant Brits opposed to the government meddling in every aspect of their lives were bracing for a prime minister who describes himself as a socialist–and thinks that...
Read More »It’s All MMT: The Fraud of “Monetary Policy”
Modern monetary theory (MMT) is not convincing to most trained economists of various schools of thought. This causes many to balk at MMT and mock it, some of which is warranted as a reductio ad absurdum, especially given some of MMT’s more outlandish claims. In fact, my own thesis was an Austrian critique of MMT.But there is also a fair amount of hypocrisy in the non-Austrian (e.g., mainstream, Keynesian, monetarist) critiques of MMT by mainstream economists. The...
Read More »War and Inflation
[This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s conference on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.]The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and...
Read More »The State of US Real Estate Is Not Good
The Home BuyersAs reported by ZeroHedge recently, the NAR U.S. Pending Home Sales Index dropped 2.1 percent MoM in May, down 6.6 percent YoY.To put these numbers into perspective, the current index is at 70.8, or 70.8 percent of the contract activity in the base year 2001. This is lower than any point during the 2008 financial crisis; even lower than 2020, when lockdowns brought markets to a screeching halt. This is the lowest level of contract activity in my...
Read More »Public Goods, Government Transfers, and Lawsuits for Clean Air and Climate Mitigation
Since the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society, the US federal budget has shifted from providing pubic goods to distributing transfers (in the form of both spending and lending) to favored groups, a continually metastasizing shift that has now created a federal budgetary and debt crisis. It has also allowed politicians to perfect the fine art of buying votes by awarding federal transfers to select voter groups as a means to winning elections.What are Public...
Read More »July 4th Regrets
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 »Praxeology and Animals
Many academic fields are devoted to reconstructing reality, to make reality fit their socialist ideals better. Those who wish to reconstruct reality argue, for example, that there is no reason why some animals should be regarded as “wild.” They argue that we should seek “new ways to think and act in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity” and that there is no reason to exclude the animal world from that enterprise. Instead, “we have a responsibility...
Read More »What If Public Schools Were Abolished?
In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long lines of people hope to be hired.Why is this? It has something to do with the fact that public schools are part of our...
Read More »Tackling More of Robert Reich’s ‘Economic Myths’
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 »Milei Snubs the Spanish Political Establishment
Argentinian president Javier Milei recently snubbed the Spanish political class by visiting Spain and refusing to meet with any government officials, attending a rally of the opposition party Vox, and insinuating that the socialist Spanish president’s wife—currently at the heart of an anticorruption case—was corrupt. In retaliation, the Spanish president recalled his country’s ambassador from Buenos Aires.Now none of this will interest those who have realized the...
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