In Wednesday’s Mises Daily article, Gary Galles explained how there’s no way to predict the many new ways the marketplace can create, deliver, and sustain amazing new things. This is why freedom is so essential.
We have been watching the Canadian Housing Bubble unfold for the last several years. Now someone is putting together a special fund to help wealthy Canadians hedge their bets against their real estate holding. The idea for the fund is based explicitly on the Austrian theory of the business cycle.
This poll says that 72% of Americans now consider big government to be the biggest problem America faces, not big business or big labor. Austrian economists had long said that the battle against big government seems hopeless and then bang, the people wake up and you have an ideological revolution on your hands. HT: RD
Economics and martial arts? One might be tempted to think that those two things can’t have anything in common. But there are some parallels that we can trace. First of all, both are types of systematic knowledge. The former is the study of human action and interaction with goods and services and the latter is the study of the best way to physically overpower another man. Both are ideas developed throughout millennia subdivided in several different schools or styles.
[I]t’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office. (Applause) This shouldn’t be an ideological question. It was Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, who once said, “They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” And for those of you who don’t speak old-English – (laughter) – let me translate. It means if you work hard, you should make a decent living.
[Editor’s Note: This is an old interview from the Harvard Political Review, reprinted here for the use of our readers and students.]
The USA Today reports on the skyscraper building mania in New York City. Multiple building have been built or are under construction or planning that reach into the super skyscraper category although no new records heights are planned at this time. This seems like another indicator of the Skyscraper Curse. I explain the theoretical connection between the building of record high skyscrapers and business cycles in this paper.
