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Apparently all it takes to get recognition these days from the National Bureau of Economic Research is to time yourself doing math problems.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

First the good news. The House Financial Services Committee has held a hearing on “Legislation to Reform the Federal Reserve on its 100-year Anniversary.” The hearing focused on a bill introduced by Scott Garrett and Bill Huizenga which would require the Fed to provide Congress with a clear rule to describe the course of monetary policy. Now for the bad news.

Scarcity makes efficiency — getting the most value from given resources —important. The more efficient individuals are, the more they benefit from their actions. That’s why economists are always talking about efficiency.

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This transcript is adapted from an interview with Mark Thornton and David Morgan at The Morgan Report. Mark Thornton is available for media interviews. Contact him here.

David Morgan: Could you give us your personal assessment on the current economic landscape?

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Many Americans, perhaps a substantial majority, still believe that, irrespective of any problems they may have caused, labor unions are fundamentally an institution that exists in the vital self-interest of wage earners. Indeed, many believe that it is labor unions that stand between the average wage earner and a life of subsistence wages, exhausting hours of work, and horrific working conditions.

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After the empirical failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, and the corresponding unpopularity of state control of the economy, left-leaning economists and politicos have increasingly turned to other justifications for state intervention into the economy, climate change being one particular example. Alternatively, one of the more “trendy” ways of justifying state interventionism has been a “dynamic” theory of the state.

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At the time of this writing, Argentina is a few days away from formally defaulting on its debts.How could this happen three times in just twenty-eight years?

History is full of tax revolts. It’s a fairly popular pastime, if historians are to be believed. But when do they come? What’s the spark and what’s the gasoline?

In Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, he argues that long military campaigns are unwise because they exhaust the people, and he says that long campaigns exhaust “seven tenths” of the wealth of the elites.