Now that the new design is stable, we would like to thank all those who have commented on the new theme, and those who worked endless hours to make this dream a reality. There are new features planned, including a complete conversion of Mises.com, a drill-down search tool, and many small fixes as well. We hope that the new Mises.org will make your user experience even more rich and productive. 
Here is a funny column on Marketwatch that argues that “While Obama, despite his University of Chicago connections, is no Friedrich Hayek, he is closer to the Austrian economist’s classic notion of ‘liberal’ - i.e. favoring market forces over government fiat - than his Democratic rival.” Probably true in the same way that Alaska is closer than the North Pole to being a tropical paradise.
On a recent trip to the grocery store I was shocked to find that the price of a package of Corn Skewers (those little yellow things you use to eat hot corn on the cob) had fallen to 25 cents when normally they would sell for at least 79 cents or higher. Is this a sign of deflation or simply another fallout from the irrational ethanol program? I’ve heard that up to 30% of corn production will eventually be diverted to ethanol production so that means less corn on the cob for us.
So I tried it again, an article on economics that attempts to reach an audience disinclined to read about economics. It begins:
“The following will explain the most important idea in the history of social analysis. The notion (actually, it’s a description of reality that is all around us but rarely noticed) has been around for many centuries. It was first discovered by late-medieval monks working in Spain. It was given scientific precision in the classical period. It is the basis of advances in social theory in the 20th century.”
Silly season is back. As occurred several years ago with the mad rush to pass the disastrous Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the wake of the Enron collapse, Washington is preparing to use the imploding housing market as an excuse to ratchet up securities regulations. The trigger for a new round of rulemaking was the Fed’s decision, as part of the Bear Stearns bailout, to allow investment banks to borrow directly from the discount window for overnight funding.
A credit crisis has been spreading through the economic system. It began with the collapse of the housing bubble, which was the result of years of Federal Reserve–sponsored credit expansion. This credit expansion poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the purchase of homes largely by subprime borrowers who never had a realistic capability of repaying their mortgage debts in the first place. And, not surprisingly, large numbers of them in fact stopped making the payments required by their mortgages.
