For kicks, and to make sure that I don’t just buy libertarian “indoctrination” without listening to the opposition, I’m on the Heritage Foundation e-mail list. Today, I received an entertaining article on the PolicyWire. Marriage Amendment Protects Federalism by Edwin Meese III. The sad thing is, it’s not intended to be entertaining. But, when
If you follow financial news related to Fed policy, you would have noticed a recent push for the use of “a new monetary tool,” called countercyclical capital buffers. Some prominent Fed officials and Fed watchers — the monetary version of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men — have decided the time is now to start raising such
On a recent jaunt to the end of the world, I found myself in one of those situations awkward for an Austrian economist, which is that of defending the Chicago school and Milton Friedman. As a result of my discussions with Chileans regarding economics and politics—especially the persisting divide in Chile between Allende and Pinochet supporters—I
A new book argues that not only was the doomed investment firm way overexposed to risky assets and beleaguered by bad management, but it also made the wrong choice when it was requested to help out LTCM ten years earlier. From a review : Bear had been the only big firm that refused to help out Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that came
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
Italians love cash and avoid credit and debit purchases at the highest rate of all the euro region. As a result, they are among the region’s least indebted and biggest savers. It’s estimated that the government loses 100 billion euros of revenue a year in untaxed transactions, while its banking cartel loses out on billions of possible fee revenue
That is the title of a new paper in the latest issue of Critical Review, by Colander, Goldberg, Haas, Juselius, Kirman, Lux, and Sloth. The article is not yet online, but the abstract is here : Economists not only failed to anticipate the financial crisis; they may have contributed to it–with risk and derivatives models that, through spurious
For a few years now, a modern form of Luddite-ism has decried a seemingly ramped-up use of technology that is expected to upend labor markets in the near future to degrees heretofore unseen. In this world, what we know as fast food restaurants will become completely self-serve , with iPad-ish screens used to order French fries and machines in the
Readers of the Mises Economics Blog will be glad to know of a job opening : Detroit’s Wayne State University is seeking “a nationally prominent academic leader for the Coleman A. Young Endowed Chair in Urban Affairs.” Coleman Young was, of course, the corrupt mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1994 and is seen today as one of the most destructive and
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.