“I know no time which is lost more thoroughly than that devoted to arguing on matters of fact with a disputant who has no facts, but only very strong convictions.” So said, James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, London 1901. In line with the above definition of futility, I shall not spend time re-refuting all the false lines of
From the heart of the would-be global Hoi Phylakes — the Council for Foreign Relations — comes a piece written by their Director of International Economics, Benn Steil, which bemoans the costs imposed by monetary nationalism and floating exchange rates and even suggests that ‘digital gold’ accounts might one day become the money of the future.
Always one of the more sensible of our supposed monetary Guardians, Jerry Jordan, former President of the Cleveland Regional Fed has contributed a piece to the St. Louis Fed’s latest ‘Review’ in which he draws extensively — if not 100% correctly — upon Hayek and
In a neat admission that his bosses are rotting the money in our pockets, Chicago Fed economist Francois Velde has come up with a bright idea : debase the nickel by a factor of five! “The problem [of the current high price of metal] remains for the nickel, but there is a simple fix that encompasses both coins. If we formally discontinue the
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Boston Fed President Cathy Minehan have been telling us that the check is in the mail. Once everybody receives a few hundred of their own dollars back from Leviathan, the economy will come roaring back. We’ll carry on with a productivity-driven market rally, while the Baby Boomers can resume planning for their
How many times have you heard the unthinking comment that we need to keep consumption burning brightly because “consumption is two-thirds of GDP”? There it is, after all, in black and white. If you look up the GDP release, you see that, in 2001, nominal GDP was $10 trillion dollars and change, while personal consumption expenditures were a touch
Corrigan heads Capital Insight , a financial consultancy. He was interviewed at the Mises Institute prior to his lecture on the “What Happened to Recovery?” MISES.ORG : It seems like the Austrian story of the boom is getting out there. CORRIGAN : My sense is that many Austrians have described the process of the boom very well. The literature deals
Forget Greenspan’s timorous optimism about the economy—after all, ask yourself when, in the course of the whole dirty dozen of futile rate cuts, he last talked its prospects down ? No. Just like the tired old stock promoter he is, Bookie Al always thinks better days are ‘round the corner, so puh-leeze, People, let’s perform our own analysis
From either side of the Atlantic, two of the more influential proselytes of that degenerate old collectivist, John Maynard Keynes, have chosen to re-iterate all the old myths once again. ‘Now the corporate sector at large doesn’t merely want to reduce its net borrowings but actually in many cases wants to become a net saver. In the language of
How much comfort can the U.S. take in the sufferings of Japan? In a side-by-side comparison of the productivity of the two economies, the U.S. comes off looking worse than one might expect, while Japan, long in the mire of recession, not as badly as one might assume. True, this little examination may seem misplaced now that Resona Bank, Japan’s
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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.