Mises Daily

Pity the businessman who hires someone just out of school! Most graduating seniors have lived a lush life in college, after living a lazy life in high school, and a goof-off life before that.

In the 1930s, the National Bureau of Economic Research introduced the economic-indicators approach as a way of capturing early warnings regarding upcoming recession or prosperity. The indicators approach is based on a view that it is possible to ascertain the state of an economic business cycle by monitoring economic data, regardless of what the nature of the causes of the business cycle are. Despite the simplicity of this approach, it does not always work, writes Frank Shostak.

The costs that the "War on Drugs" imposes upon people cannot be underestimated. We bear the costs of building and maintaining prisons, and the burdens of creating vast new classes of people who are called criminals because they have engaged in mutually agreeable exchanges with other people.

It was only a matter of time before the Feds realized that political capital could be created from the Enron mess. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is now investigating all electricity sellers for evidence of pricing schemes employed during California’s energy crisis. In true Soviet-like fashion, the FERC has issued a deadline by which suspected firms must “admit or deny” their complicity in engaging in spurious pricing schemes during the time period.

Despite the global changes since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s leadership continues to bank on a centrally planned economy as a viable way into the future and to maintain that it is not the inefficiency of the socialist system but primarily the U.S.-American blockade that is the prime culprit in creating Cuba's economic problems.

The Swedes, we have been told, enjoy free medical care, generous welfare benefits, time off from work, and subsidies for just about everything. According to a recent study, however, the cat is out of the bag: relative to families in the United States, Swedish family income is considerably less.

Free trade creates wealth, writes Gary Galles. But when free trade threatens the wallets of interest groups, support for government restrictions to protect them in order to assure "fair" trade suddenly blossoms--only because that sounds better than "gimme money." It is still just a form of welfare, which can only impoverish Americans by restricting our access to lower-cost sources of supply.

By granting parties who cannot demonstrate actual harm the legal standing to sue, we have opened the legal pasture to a veritable flood of new grazers, who do not care  about the harm they inflict on others whose claims may not only be more pressing but may also have real merit. David Laband explains.

Individuals and foundations have sunk millions of dollars into D.C. "think tanks" and seminars, writes William Anderson, in hopes of teaching economics to those who are in positions of political leadership. Lest we be tempted to think this is working, read the latest U.S. Senate "investigative report" on oil prices. The political classes and their media allies have cooked up yet another conspiracy theory on the evils of private enterprise.

Many consider Walt Whitman America's greatest poet, and his Leaves of Grass the most influential poetry volume in American literature. But Whitman's poetic celebration of individual freedom is not limited to his poetry.  It is also reflected in the all-but-overlooked prose he penned during his extensive career as a journalist and editor.