Some restaurants in Florida and California have tacked on a surcharge to their diners’ food and beverage bills to help defray the looming costs of the Affordable Care Act. The Gator’s Dockside chain of restaurants in Florida has added a 1 percent surcharge while Republique, a trendy restaurant in Los Angeles, is increasing patrons’ tabs by 3
Frank Shostak writes in today’s Mises Daily: Most economic commentators blame the weakening in economic data on bad weather conditions that have gripped much of the US. On this way of thinking the economy remains strong and short setbacks are on account of consumers and businesses putting off purchases. However, this should reverse, so it is
Apparently, it does not take much Artificial Intelligence to flummox academic scientists. In 2005, three MIT graduate students developed a simple computer program that generates gobbledygook texts . They then added their names to one of them and submitted it as paper to an academic conference. It was quickly accepted. The heroic hoaxsters then
While the costs of providing health care insurance are beginning to skyrocket because of Obamacare, insurance company executives are sleeping very soundly. A respected consultant to health insurance companies, Robert Laszewski, reveals that there are two obscure provisions in Obamacare that guarantee that insurance companies will be subsidized and
In 1998 Paul Krugman declared “It’s Baaack” in a silly article heralding the return of the Keynesian liquidity trap, a chimera that even Keynes himself never believed in. But recently something very real and truly dreadful has climbed out of the witch’s brew of fiscal and monetary stimulus policies concocted by Ben Bernanke and other mainstream
King Banaian’s post at Liberty&Power presents a caricature of Austrian Business Cycle Theory that neither the quiz nor any Austrian could embrace. He writes that he is “unpersuaded that the length and severity of the Depression was due to wildly overexpansionary monetary policies in the 1920s.” The quiz question number 16 makes no such claim.
King Banaian’s post at Liberty&Power (scroll down a bit) says that Mises’s view that interventionism prolonged the Great Depression does not appear to have been Rothbard’s. In fact, Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression only explained—and was only intended to explain as he explicitly points out in his Intro (p. xli)—the 1929-33 period. He does
In his articles (” The Trade Question ,” The Washington Times 8/8/03 and “ Second Thoughts on Free Trade ,” nytimes.com 1/6/04) attacking the application of the Ricardian argument in favor of free trade to the modern world, Paul Craig Roberts is half right. It seems to me his critics such as Bruce Bartlett et al. have misconstrued his argument
To add to Reisman , more than fifty years ago, Ludwig von Mises recognized and carefully spelled out the limited applicability of Ricardo’s law of comparative cost or advantage. In those conditions of free international movement of capital and labor in which the law does not apply (e.g., in the later nineteenth century and currently), Mises
The usually sensible Larry White recently blogged a silly and petty comment on Hans Hoppe’s Mises Daily Article “ The Yield from Money Held’ Reconsidered. “ White quoted the following two (consecutive) paragraphs from Hoppe’s article: The second example [of supposed anti-Hutt thinking] is from closer at home, i.e., from the proponents of “free
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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. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.