Mises Daily

Obama says that the key to progress is good government. Not so. The real common thread to progress is free enterprise. Progress and prosperity have followed movement toward freer markets and secure property rights.

Austrians get a bum rap for their prescription for recession. The readjustment process is not cruel; it is about permitting production to align more closely with consumer preferences. Recovery, like growth and development, requires forward-looking planning.

Many elected officials are already wealthy by most people's standards. What makes the wealthy and otherwise successful want to hold office? Is it an  overweening ego and an insatiable hunger for public adulation?

The Tea Party, no matter how successful it is at the polls in November, will certainly betray the party of liberty. There are several reasons for this, but the fundamental one is intellectual. The Tea Party does not have a coherent view of liberty.

Blinder is arguing that of course the Obama stimulus worked, because spending money creates jobs, period. To see just how naive this view is, consider that there is nothing in Blinder's argument restricting it to cases of severe recession.

Rocker was awful on economics, but his focus was not on that. He wrote about nationalism and culture, and here Rocker is fantastic. "States create no culture; indeed, they are often destroyed by higher forms of culture."

If mainstream analysts continue to disregard the role of regime uncertainty in the major depressions of the modern era, especially in accounting for their extraordinary duration, then they will only demonstrate the poverty of their own mode of analysis.

It is not the system of private enterprise and free markets that is responsible. It is the suspension of that system. It is not capitalism but interventionism and monetary uncertainty that are responsible for the persistence of the slump.

In the last week there have been many interesting developments involving gold. The price of the yellow metal set a new record, breaking through the $1,300 barrier. A German firm is preparing to install gold-vending machines in the United States. There's more.

Mises was the premier Austrian economist of his generation, whose legacy reveals him to be the greatest economist of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly, he kept the embers of free-market economics burning during the interwar years.