It has long been expected since Morales’ election, notes the Washington Post : Bolivian President Evo Morales seized control of the country’s natural gas industry Monday, sending soldiers to occupy fields that he contends private companies have plundered for years. Morales said that unless foreign energy firms agreed to give Bolivia’s state oil
“Gold is a barometer of the common stock of a country, and right now gold is sniffing out weakness in the management of the United States as a business,” said Mr. Sinclair, 65, a lifelong Republican who twice voted for President Bush. “Iran is becoming a nuclear power. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is on a puppet string controlled by the
Click and read this 1956 Freeman essay by a 30-year-old Murray Rothbard, recently provided on the Foundation for Economic Education’s web site. One can see many themes here that would later be expanded upon in For a New Liberty
A colleague of mine recently e-mailed me about Exxon’s profits: There are over 6 billion shares of Exxon stock, so its earnings were only $1.37 per share...on a $61 stock! The Exxon earnings are actually a disappointment. The only reason the number is so huge is that the company is huge after all the mergers (many many many stockholders). Why not
“Dad Dean” considers university tenure systems at insidehighered.com . Tenure certainly meets the needs for security and predictability, but it does so by granting impunity and saddling a college with immovable costs for the life of the employee. (It used to expire at 70, which struck me as more than fair, but now it expires at death.) As any
This morning’s New York Times business page reports that Toyota is expected to replace Ford as the second-best selling automobile manufacturer in the United States next month. This is a significant event in the auto industry. Ford has held the No. 2 spot since the 1920s. The story is rich with information. Several Ford models that sold well six
The AP is reporting that the US saving rate was negative for all of 2005, something that hasn’t happened for 70 years: The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before _ in 1932 and 1933 _ two years when the country was struggling to cope with the Great Depression, a time of massive business failures and job layoffs. With
On the day that representatives from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems appear before a Congressional hearing for complying with the Chinese government’s rules in order to gain a foothold there, I read that Wal-Mart is being ordered by Massachusetts bureaucrats to sell a controversial abortifacient known as the “morning after” pill. In
A role for government is to insure against every possible risk that markets do not cover, says Harvard Business Professor David Moss : ...one of the underpinnings of our living standards is government’s willingness to reduce risks by being society’s insurer of last resort. This is because a notable flaw of the free-market system is the inability
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.