Mises Daily

Day in and day out, for hundreds of years, pawnbrokers have engaged in a perfectly legitimate business, write Glen Tenney.

For local government bureaucrats around the country the Fifth Amendment has been stood on its head, with "public use" meaning any private use that generates more tax booty for city hall and "just compensation" meaning whatever the local government goons can steal the property for, writes Doug French.

Menger's Principles of Economics is a remarkable book, writes Gil Guillory. Most of what is found in the great systematic treatises by Mises and Rothbard is treated in almost precisely the same way as Menger treated them in 1871.

It is the Mises Institute's great pleasure to introduce Carl Menger's 1871 book Principles of Economics to an online audience.

There are some bright spots in the American economy, but look beneath the surface. Stefan Karlsson warns that the downside of bad policy may have been merely postponed. 

Robert Murphy's prediction of what four more years will bring us: massive spending, massive deficits, and massive debt. After all, that's what Republican presidents do.

Not for the first time in world history, writes Lew Rockwell, US voters on November 3 faced a choice between two varieties of statism, two forms of central planning, two types of duplicity, two approaches to rule by government. One won, one lost, and liberty awaits another day for victory. In this, our times are not unlike the 1930s, when during a crisis just about everyone believed that there were only two political options worth pursuing.

It turns out that our senior legislators somehow are very astute stock pickers, writes N. Joseph Potts. Something very fishy is going on here, and no one seems to care to get the law involved. 

To be an Austrian has become oddly fashionable in recent days, observes Sean Corrigan, judging from the number of news reports thus describing commentators on economic and financial affairs. 

Many say that markets are fine from day to day but not during exceptional events. But Lew Rockwell finds that markets love nothing more than a challenge that offers a profit opportunity.