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?
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.
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.
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.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve felt the slight sting of “patriotic duty” invoked during this current wave of big-budget sci-fi action thrillers.
The recent civil disobedience, rioting, and police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri reminds us of what happens when police states and bad economics are mixed together.
Devastated by decades of ruinous economic policies, the economies of many inner cities continue to languish as the self-ownership of local residents is treated with contempt by the police and any attempt at building a small business-based or wage-based economy is hobbled by government regulation.
As an apparently war-minded people, Americans (or at least, our American political leaders) have been comfortable framing parts of the domestic policy agenda as wars for decades. Two of the most prominent have been the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.
Despite the similarity in their names, there is an important difference between the two. The War on Poverty is not a real war. The War on Drugs is.
2014’s Mises University concluded last Saturday evening following a full week of seminars, lectures, and many opportunities to work with Mises faculty and fellow students to discuss, learn, and plan for the future.
Recently, a corn ethanol plant in Nebraska that switched to using cheaper sugar to produce biofuel was sued by local corn farmers. The dispute allows a glimpse into the clashing worlds of subsidized agriculture, and highlights what happens when people make market-oriented decisions within the tangled framework of the state-directed economy.
