• Gauging the Risks: MSNBC’s Economic Roundtable (MSNBC): So far this year, the most pessimistic forecasters in the panel have been the most accurate, led by Georgia State University’s Rajeev Dhawan and UCLA’s Leamer. But the optimists are convinced their time has come. Said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Bank One: “If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to scratch our heads and say, you know what? We don’t get it.

The Mises Institute is very pleased to host an online edition of George Reisman’s treatise Capitalism. This fully interative edition of this 1000+ page book (1996) is packed with hyperlinks built within the PDF file, even from within the index. It is now linked at the Study Guide. It is also available as hard copy through the Mises.org Catalog. 

Today’s  Daily Article of Henry Hazlitt’s cogent (and still timely) analysis of the NRA reminded me of the following excerpt from John T. Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth [San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1998, pp. 40-41].  Flynn’s description of the Blue Eagle program, meant to intimidate private business to comply with NRA regulations, sounds eerily like the if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us mentality that pressures business to this day. 

Ludwig’s younger brother.

Will the Job Market Ever Get Better? (CNN.com): “Even if the Labor Department says the unemployment rate didn’t rise in June, there’s little hope that payrolls grew very much, if any. Payrolls have fallen year-over-year for 23 straight months, according to Labor Department data, and could very well add another month in June, extending the worst stretch for the labor market since World War II.”

Economic history from Richard Bernstein of the New York Times: “In France, for example, mandatory vacations were among the great victories of the working class in its bitter struggle with capital, finally won when Léon Blum’s Popular Front government came to power, briefly, in 1936.”

Monetary Policy in a Zero-Interest Rate Economy (Dallas Fed): The strategy for eliminating the zero bound, therefore, is to make money pay a negative nominal interest rate, by imposing some type of “carry tax” on currency and deposits. It’s easy to envision such a system with regard to deposits at the Federal Reserve or transactions deposits at banks; for the most part, the technology to implement such a system is already in place.

Richard Benson explains in this piece -- Government Statistics: Lessons in Cooking and Spinning -- how most government statistics are fabricated, padded, tweaked, or otherwised pushed and squeezed to come out more favorably than what the data shows.  One example is that in the CPI, inflation is made to look lower by replacing house prices, which are inflating, with owner-equivalent rent.  Rents are falling, in part because of the housing bubble.  But when calculating personal s

THE INTEREST PROBLEM

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s three-volume work, Capital and Interest,1 is a classic, both because of its brilliant analysis and its witty exposition.  The first volume provides a history and critique of all preceding explanations of the “interest problem.”  For Böhm-Bawerk, the task of the in

• The Economist was founded by opponents of British protectionism. In this essay (Radical Birthday Thoughts), the editor looks back at the founding principles and assesses the current attack on free trade and free markets.
  • There is no clear, coherent case being presented for a retreat from liberalism. But protectionism and other forms of government intervention do not necessarily require a coherent case if they are to succeed.