Ending price supports would certainly allow agricultural markets to work more efficiently, but isn’t it odd to observe the government voluntarily ending a subsidy program that benefits a powerful political constituency—wealthy corporate farmers? It is odd indeed, which is why it isn’t true.
The Austrian economists—Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek most prominently—were not alone in predicting the baneful effects of central banking and paper money.
The only really proper reform of Social Security is the gradual abolition of the whole system.
Our times are much like the 1930s, when it was widely assumed that there were only two viable ideological positions: communism or fascism.
Politcal movements often find themselves hypnotized by the prospect of power and passively obeying the commands of the state to dance, sing, and otherwise perform according to the state’s bidding.
The concept of taxation well deserves its partnership with death. Death and taxes, you know. Two vultures. Both, to say the least, deadly.
Has academia become so politicized that teaching good economics, and using politically sensitive illustrations, can lead to threats, fines, penalties, demotion and worse? It certainly seemed so in early February when Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a leading student of Murray Rothbard and senior fellow of the Mises Institute, received an egregious letter from the Provost of his university.
In March of 2004 Microsoft was fined a record $648 million by the European Commission for exercising its (alleged) monopoly power in the operating systems market.
Many economists mistakenly believe taxation can be good for economic growth, that war can buck up prosperity, and that even natural disasters can spur wealth creation by causing people to spend. All of this is fallacy because it fails to consider the costs of destruction, the alternative use of resources, and the unseen effects of diverted uses of property.
In the ten years between 1994 and 2004, a dramatic turn took place within the Republican Party. The themes of the 1994 election weren’t just about cutting government, though that was the central campaign promise of that generation of elected officials sent to Washington. The core was more revolutionary than that: it was a dogged commitment to full freedom philosophy forged in opposition to all the works of the central state.
