Cheeseburgers When Subsidized

Corn, wheat, sugar and a dozen other crops all got increased subsidies in the recent Farm Bill, signed with terrifying agreement. Is there an end in sight? One overlooked clue while those crops are fetching sky-high prices in that other system known as the free market is data showing farms took acreage from pastureland, which livestock need to graze. So, ranchers have been liquidating herds and giving up in the battle against soaring feed costs.

Grand Theft Society

A core problem with government is that its managers believe that all reality will conform to their wishes if they issue the right orders, pass the right laws, and put the right people in charge. Reality resists this simple-minded approach; witness the debacle of the war on terror. Sadly, the same group that has managed that war is now managing another one: the war on recession.

Activity v. Activism

The Supreme Court’s Heller ruling upholding the Second Amendment’s individual right to bear arms has created uproar among liberals. But rather than addressing Justice Scalia’s powerful logical and historical analysis of the amendment, they have attacked it as judicial activism.

However, the central issue is not judicial activism. It is not whether the court should be active, but which principles will inform its activity. In fact, activism that constrains government power in deference to constitutional protections mirrors our founders’ views.

Those pesky savers

According to a report from the Washington Post and The Columbus Dispatch, the genesis of the housing market bubble was global wealth; not excess meaningless paper, but true wealth.

So the bubble was not caused by the FED, the bubble occurred because “a growing amount of savings, particularly in developing countries, fueled an investment bubble.” But wait, wasn’t the savings just excess meaningless paper printed by our old friends the FED? Hmmm.

The Market, Part 1

[Editor’s Note: In this very important chapter 15 of Human Action (the first half of which is presented here), Mises explains what the market really is - a process where millions of individuals interact through voluntary exchanges - and how it gives rise to the quantitative prices that undergird the mental concept of capital and hence economic calculation. In laying out his analysis of the market itself, Mises has produced a chapter which could, according to Robert Murphy, “almost serve as a stand-alone introduction to free market economics.”] 

Austrian Realists

Anyone who peruses the top mainstream economics journals will quickly realize that economic theory has been crowded out by mathematical formalism. The neoclassical economists’ uncompromising quest for precision in their models has been achieved at the expense of the accuracy of their predictions.

The old joke of the drunk searching for his keys near the streetlight is an appropriate metaphor.

The Market Works Just in Time

The recent political controversies over record oil prices have underscored the sad truth that even nominal friends of the market don’t understand how it really works. Because they have only a superficial grasp of this complex “organism” and how it coordinates interactions among billions of Homo sapiens spread across the entire planet, they quickly denounce its operations whenever things depart from the ordinary

Should We Buy Only Locally Grown Produce?

Let’s suppose that people do decide to “buy local” with the goal of saving the world and reducing their carbon footprint. This will increase the demand for locally grown foods, but it will also have an unintended and likely deleterious consequence; it will increase the demand for farm implements and labor. Since the decision to buy locally is essentially the decision to forsake comparative advantage, every unit of agricultural output will be more resource intensive than it would be under specialization, division of labor, and trade.
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