To illustrate one of the pernicious effects of socialism to my classes, I will often ask students what would happen if I decided to minimize failure by taking away points from the A students and give them to the F students. What happens to the incentives faced by hard-working students who get good grades? What lessons are learned by the
The Church of England has some monopoly power in this area, causing it to lose its focus and ignore the needs of its consumers. The Economist calls for its disestablishment . An excerpt: Establishment brings fewer material advantages to the Church of England these days than the Lutherans, for example, enjoy in much of Scandinavia. And a creeping
During the late 19th century and early 20th, a confluence of circumstances transformed the United States into an industrial giant. Among these circumstances were a private-property, profit-oriented economy with a vast, internal free market. Soft coal from West Virginia and iron ore from Minnesota were sent to Pittsburgh to make steel and – with
The recent collapse of financial giants Lehman and AIG have led to new calls for regulation. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has proposed a six point plan to deal with the current financial situation. He believes that the government needs to “correct the incentives for executives” by requiring that bonuses be paid on five year
The current issue of Cato Unbound features Roderick Long’s critique of “Conflationism,” defined as the “pervasive conflation of corporatist plutocracy with libertarian laissez-faire.” As Roderick rightly points out, in the mixed economy large corporations are among the prime beneficiaries of government largess, such that a wholesale defense of
Roderick Long has kindly responded to my critique of his essay on corporatism. I don’t find Roderick’s reply very convincing, however. I don’t have posting privileges on Cato Unbound so I’ll offer a brief response here. My basic critique of Roderick’s position is two-fold. First, on substance: Roderick’s arguments strike me as a form of what
And this morning, the Fed has deemed it necessary to lend, with no collateral, directly to businesses, thereby repeating in a worse form the very errors of Fannie and Freddie. Clowns with wrecker balls! Comments at the Washington Times are interesting. “Sounds like a great plan, who came up with that? Now I remember, it was
As I noted in The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC , the state grants patent monopolies and then uses antitrust law to attack the beneficiaries of those monopolies. As one commentator noted in a related thread , “It is amusing, watching one agency of government applying a system whose entire purpose is the creation of monopolies, and
Tom DiLorenzo, in his new book, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution - And What It Means for Americans Today (see his The Founding Father of Constitutional Subversion ), shows how Hamilton helped to subvert the superior (and more libertarian) Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution. But though
House rejects the bill . This is a magnificent repudiation of the Fed, the Treasury, Bush, Wall Street welfarists, inflationists, and stabilizers of all sorts. The costs of what the Fed has already done are going to be massive and felt for many years. But at least Congress has so far, and this time only, not participated in the evil. It’s a great
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. 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.