Mises Daily

The politics of the environmentalists are increasingly predictable and obvious. They oppose all forms of capitalistic innovation. Indeed, they represent a special kind of danger to the human race that socialism never did.

In other words, in seeking to boost sales by exploiting the possibilities of modern finance (in a perfectly legal manner), GMAC and Ford Motor Credit, GE and John Deere (among countless others) may have misled our preening, erstwhile Maestro into financing the whole wasteful bubble of the late 1990s!

If I were to give a tour of the United States to visitors from a socialist country, who are used to experiencing chronic shortages of almost everything, Wal-Mart would be one of the first places I would take them. It is a perfect symbol of one of the most remarkable things that we have — an enormous variety of high quality, low cost products that are available to virtually everyone throughout the United States.

Few economists have the courage to point to labor legislation and regulation as the very cause of mass unemployment.

Monetary central planning, as perpetrated by the Federal Reserve, provides the key to hollowing out and creating a pro-statist populace.

What I have shown is that to the extent that government spending consists either of waste or of intermediate goods, measurement of the standard of living of those working in the private sector is rendered much more accurately by Rothbard's measurement of PPR per private sector worker than by the Department of Commerce's per capita GNP.

They seem blissfully unaware that once the power to define words is given to the state, it merely depends on who runs the state in order for the definition to be changed, and they seem too ready to tinker with the US Constitution in order to manage something that should have absolutely nothing to do with the state.

These are but a few highlights from the outstanding presentations made at the first meeting of the Property and Freedom Society; which stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism. If only Murray, that joyous, uncompromising intellectual radical could have been there with us.

Yes, we've all heard the clichés about the greater good. I've never met a serial killer, a sniper, or the leader of a suicide cult. But I'm willing to bet that they too believe that they served a greater good.

I wanted to show students that economics stems from ordinary human behavior in the real world we face every day. By showing them that trade, money, savings, competition, and prices all have distinctly human origins and purposes, I hoped to help them make better sense out of the "economics" they will some day be exposed to.