In April 2017, the Bank of Mexico transferred an unprecedented figure to the federal government: 321,653 billion Mexican pesos from its operating surplus. How much is this figure? It is equivalent to 1.7% of Mexico’s GDP — 25% of Guatemala’s GDP — and to 22% of the total revenue budget of the Mexican government.

In his article today, Christopher Westley noted that Texas’s economy — when measured by GDP — is larger than Canada’s. In other words: If Texas were an independent country, it would be the world’s 10th largest economy (totaling $1.6 trillion), and its citizens would be more than capable of addressing natural disasters of the magnitude of a major flood. Texas’s economy is also larger than those of Russia and Australia.

Paul Cantor, Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute, attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at NYU as a young man. He recently surprised and delighted a few of us by revealing that the line that he remembers Mises speaking most frequently in the seminar was “No farzer credit expansion!”  As a native German speaker with an accent and less than complete familiarity with English usage, what Mises meant to say, of course, was “No further credi

A political economy of natural disasters does not exactly exist yet. There are no classes in it that I know of. A dearth of writing attempts to define it. Yet, some of its lessons cry out following Hurricane Harvey’s wall banger into the coast of Texas. 

A few weeks ago I was quoted, along with several other business-school professors, in a newspaper article on President Trump’s management style. Does the fact that Trump was a successful businessperson before becoming President -- rather than a lawyer and politician, like most of his predecessors -- make him a better chief executive? (George W.

Baseball may still identify as America’s pastime, but every year consumers prove that football is the country’s true love. In fact, the intertwining of national identity and the NFL can often be troublesome, such as when the Pentagon pays the league to promote the military — or the large subsidies governments grant to help billionaires pay for new stadiums. Yet increasingly America’s best athletes in America’s favorite sport have to flee the country to get medical treatment, because of an opponent more dangerous than Ndamukong Suh: the Food and Drug Administration.

The great investor and writer Andy Kessler frequently points out that the failure rate among Silicon Valley start-ups is 90 percent.  Every member of the economics profession would be wise to memorize the previous figure, and repeat it daily.  If so, economists might come closer to understanding why they’re mystified by what they deem slow economic growth.  And mystified they are.  So much so that they’ve apparently given up. 

Teaching and writing about public policy for more than half my life has taught me that most of the errors made in that realm are not complicated or sophisticated, beyond the ability of “ordinary people” to understand. They are failures to apply basic logical and economic principles. The complications and sophistication mainly arise from efforts to disguise the misrepresentations and wealth transfers being committed, when policies are designed, presented and scored.

The greatest intellectual accomplishment of the laissez-faire liberal theorists was the recognition of the “hard” and “soft” institutions that are crucial prerequisites of productive accomplishment and material prosperity. The hard institutions include private property rights, market prices, and sound money. The soft institutions include those that reinforce values such as prudence, thrift, resourcefulness, innovative courage, and respect for success.