The Summer Fellowship Program has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding by Professor Guido Hülsmann in 2000. This year the program includes eighteen young men and women from the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Turkey, Denmark, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde’s resignation this year marked the fi rst political casualty of the current financial crisis that resulted in the collapse of all major banks, a run on deposits, a stock market drop of 90 percent, empty grocery shelves, plus a severe recession.
Many commentators misidentify the true source of Iceland’s meltdown, resulting in prescribed cures that fall short of the necessary actions.
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens. The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism”—i.e., competition.
Most people would admit to hoarding money only with a tinge of guilt, because to be a hoarder carries with it the suggestion of being a miser—a Scrooge. And yet, every participant in an economy based on indirect exchange holds some amount of money and can be said to be hoarding it; that is, declining to spend it. Hoarding is a strategy for achieving personal goals or for dealing with economic uncertainty.
The government’s measure of unemployment has hit 10.2 percent. Given that the official House version of Obama’s healthcare plan, HR 3962, has now passed, a close examination of the effects of “Obamacare” on the labor market is important. The Democrats’ bill will seriously harm precisely those poor and uninsured citizens it is ostensibly designed to help. The harm will come by compounding mass unemployment and depriving these citizens of consumption choices.
Obamacare as Labor Tax
Climate-change policy ought to be privatized. All government policy instruments, including taxes, subsidies, regulation, and emissions trading to mitigate climate change ought to be abolished. Instead, property rights to a climate unchanged by human activity should be protected by tort litigation on the basis that strict liability is appropriate.
The Mises Institute is pleased to announce the multimedia content on Mises.org— thousands of hours of audio and video—is now available through iTunes U, a dedicated section within the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com).
iTunes U carries lectures from top academic minds on every topic, freely available, elegantly organized, and beautifully presented. Users enjoy easy access to material ranging from ancient-language studies to particle physics.
When the first Austrian Scholars Conference was held in 1992, we were at the very beginning of the Great Bubble Economy, brought to you by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and their associates at the Fed. This shiny, bubbly “new economy” has finally gone the way of all bubble economies in history, deflating into stale dishwater and swirling slowly but surely down the recessionary drain. But it has left in its wake something truly amazing, something that never could have been foreseen: a second Austrian revival.
