Mises Daily Articles

Displaying 71 - 80 of 359

Student loans

How Student Loans Create Demand for Useless Degrees

Big GovernmentPricesValue and Exchange

07/16/2015Mises Daily Articles
Apart from driving up prices, one of the main problems of subsidized government loans is the fact that a student can get the same loan terms for a high-risk degree in art history as for a safer degree in engineering.
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Exit sign

How Governments Keep You (and Your Money) From Leaving

Big GovernmentGlobal EconomyTaxes and Spending

06/05/2015Mises Daily Articles
Governments don’t like it when citizens emigrate to escape high taxes and other government-imposed costs. Governments would much rather keep productive citizens and their money at home. Bigger countries find it’s much easier to keep us in.
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Warren G. Harding

How Government Inaction Ended the Depression of 1921

The FedMoney and BanksTaxes and Spending

05/20/2015Mises Daily Articles
Everyone knows about the Great Depression which brought massive government intervention and lasted a decade. But few know of the Depression of 1920–21 which was ignored by government and lasted eighteen months.
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Mirrors

How GDP Metrics Distort Our View of the Economy

Calculation and KnowledgeInterventionismPhilosophy and Methodology

05/15/2015Mises Daily Articles
It is now commonplace for governments to measure economic prosperity with GDP metrics. Numerous arbitrary rules and faulty assumptions behind these measures, however, skew our view of how economies grow and living standards improve.
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stock prices

How Easy Money Drives the Stock Market

Money and BanksMoney and BankingPrices

04/09/2015Mises Daily Articles
As the money supply fluctuates, so does the demand for money and for goods and services. We see this in the stock market, but the effect is not instantaneous, and we must be mindful of the time delay.
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faces in the crowd

How the West Invented Individualism

World HistoryPolitical Theory

03/31/2015Mises Daily Articles
Throughout most of history, “citizens belonged to the city, body and soul,” writes Larry Siedentop in his new book Inventing the Individual . Even today, the Western idea of the free individual remains largely confined to the West.
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Italy flag on gun

How Italy’s Government Enables the Mafia

Free MarketsGlobal Economy

03/14/2015Mises Daily Articles
For decades, the Italian state has facilitated the Mafia's grip on industry in Italy. The result has been a disastrous lack of foreign investment and other ills. It now seems that only the elimination of the central state could bring about serious reform.
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Bridging the gap

How Money Production Can Worsen Income Inequality

The FedMoney and BanksMoney and Banking

02/28/2015Mises Daily Articles
Money creation does not benefit equally. It creates a class of winners (those who get new money first) at the expense of losers (those who get new money later). Not surprisingly, an inflationary money supply increases the wealth and income gap in society.
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Daily article february 14 2015

How Truly Free Markets Help the Poor

Big GovernmentFree MarketsPrivate Property

02/14/2015Mises Daily Articles
Free markets have provided an abundance of goods and comforts for even low-income households. But constant government intervention in the work, lives, and incomes of the poor continues to create many barriers to economic success.
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Faceless crowd

How Economic Aggregation Hides the Problems of Interventionism

Big GovernmentTaxes and SpendingInterventionism

02/07/2015Mises Daily Articles
Government likes to put out lots of data showing things like income and employment for huge numbers of people. The problem is, this tells us almost nothing about how real-life people are hurt or helped by government intervention.
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