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Search found 5166 items for:
- “That which is seen and that which is not seen”
Relevance: 11.867905
Library Item
Category: Articles of Interest, Institute Publications
Online Publish Date: November 25, 2022
In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole...
Relevance: 11.867129
Library Item
Category: Audio Essays, Mises Media
Online Publish Date: September 1, 2009
From Chapter I of The Bastiat Collection: Volume I. Pages 1-48 in the text. Read by Josiah Schmidt.
Relevance: 8.391804
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: June 23, 2009
I was the teaching assistant for a course on the theory of property rights during the fall semester of 2002. We spent quite a bit of time discussing rent control, various rent-control cases, and the legal principles that informed judicial decisions surrounding rent-control cases.One of these principles was an aversion to "windfall" profits. Windfall profits occur when an entrepreneur enjoys...
Relevance: 5.6404095
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: July 13, 2000
A few days ago I received an e-mail telling me that some producer at ABC-TV News was hoping to find some evidence of what taxation does to people.The post went on: "Specifically, the producer wants to find someone who is trying to cope with the high medical costs of helping an ill family member. She wants to make the point that if this person didn't have to pay so much money in taxes, she would...
Relevance: 5.634787
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: June 12, 2001
The idea of freedom has always had its critics, those who believe that coercive force is required for society to flourish and that the rule of law needs to be supplemented by proactive government policies.Michael Kelly, editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine and a very fine writer–thinker on many fronts, has offered his own criticism of the free-market thesis, and it is worth quoting before...
Relevance: 4.9690557
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: May 4, 2011
As the crazed election season approaches and straw hats are dusted off, it is prudent to remember what the 19th-century American anarchist Henry David Thoreau called "the business of living."
Although most libertarians know Thoreau through his short essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) or, perhaps, through his short book Walden, Or Life in the Woods (1854), the vast majority of Thoreau's work dealt...
Relevance: 4.5228434
Wire
Online Publish Date: August 16, 2005
Last Friday, as the puppet leaders in Iraq were arguing about what is going to be the Iraqi constitution, they had to speak especially loudly to be heard over the explosions and bombs outside. These are not ideal conditions under which to forge a new governing authority, especially one purporting to grant liberty and rights. The first ambition of the state will always be to exercise power. And if...
Relevance: 4.5116806
Wire
Online Publish Date: February 11, 2019
The emergence of economics as a new branch of knowledge was one of the most portentous events in the history of mankind. In paving the way for private capitalistic enterprise it transformed within a few generations all human affairs more radically than the preceding ten thousand years had done. From the day of their birth to the day of their demise, the denizens of a capitalistic country are...
Relevance: 4.5098224
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: February 17, 2005
These days, there is an increasing awareness of how artificially lowered interest misleads whole legions of entrepreneurs—a core point in the Austrian business cycle. But, still, the question always nags at people who think they grasp the basic idea: why do businessmen continue to fall for this scam?The gist of their query is this: surely, Scott McNealy or Andy Grove could afford to hire a guy...
Relevance: 4.5094223
Wire
Online Publish Date: August 9, 2021
GPS. The internet. Airbags. These wonders of modernity have something in common. Without government, many commentators hold, they wouldn’t exist. And perhaps these voices are right. Take GPS, developed by the Department of Defense to enhance coordination among military units. At first the sole province of government, GPS found its way into civilian hands, and by the 1990s, private sector demand...
Relevance: 4.5084667
Wire
Online Publish Date: October 28, 2020
[From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on October 9, 2020. Read and see the full lecture.]
This is the intellectual level of the conversation [around covid-19]: You just want people do die. How do you talk to somebody like that? So, in order to do that, I’m going to appeal to the above midwit-level population and I’m going...
Relevance: 4.5068464
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: November 6, 2012
A certain line of thinking is all too prevalent among liberty-minded Americans. It runs as follows: "Candidate X may not be perfect, but he is better on domestic economic policy than candidate Y, and that is obviously what matters most for liberty." This way of thinking underlies "libertarian" endorsements of candidates such as Mitt Romney, and it implicitly throws the entire antiwar aspect of...
Relevance: 4.5044312
Wire
Online Publish Date: January 29, 2009
[This is part 4 of an ongoing live blog of Against Intellectual Monopoly]Drugs patents took it on the chin a few years ago, when major drug companies refused to sell cheap AIDS drugs in Africa. Presuming the drugs work, countless lives might have been saved. But the desire to protect the high price on the patented drug--despite the low marginal cost for producing additional units--trumped the...
Relevance: 4.5044312
Wire
Online Publish Date: January 4, 2020
Our goats love this time of year. The neighboring fields have been harvested, but not completely. Around the border and in odd spots throughout the field that adjoins our property are fugitives from the combine — soybean plants laden with browned, dried pods. We tug the goats toward the gate separating pasture from field, and then, once they realize their passage is safe, they tug us to their...
Relevance: 4.178474
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: September 13, 2007
It is fitting that the Mises Institute is releasing the Bastiat Collection on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Though hundreds of years have passed since Frédéric Bastiat, the beauty of sound economic reasoning is that it does not change over time. In particular, his essay, "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen," is especially insightful in analyzing the rebuilding of the...
Relevance: 3.961533
Wire
Online Publish Date: December 8, 2009
This post is one in a series entitled Posthumous Refutations. Previously in this series: Safeway and Consumer Sovereignty in Oakland, CA.After doubling down on Afghanistan, President Obama is proving a profligacy to rival that of his predecessor as he announces that he’s going to double down on fiscal stimulus as well (h/t Spideynw in the Mises Forums).President Barack Obama outlined new...
Relevance: 3.9424984
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: July 28, 2008
Frédéric Bastiat famously observed that the state costs us in ways we can see and ways we cannot see. Economists tend to focus on the second type because they elude public perceptions. What inventions are we denied because of regulations? What might have been done with the resources that are diverted in taxes or higher prices due to protectionism? The answers demonstrate that, because of...
Relevance: 3.391714
Wire
Online Publish Date: April 15, 2013
Interest payments to banks (for money held on account wit the Fed) could rise from $1 billion in 2012 to $77 billion in 2016. Link to Bloomberg article.“Essentially the Fed paid the banks $4 billion last year, which is about $12 per American,” David Howden, a professor of economics at Saint Louis University’s campus in Madrid, Spain, said in an e-mail.Howden analyzed interest on reserve payments...
Relevance: 2.9556262
Library Item
Category: Mises Daily Articles
Online Publish Date: May 21, 2003
How much comfort can the U.S. take in the sufferings of Japan? In a side-by-side comparison of the productivity of the two economies, the U.S. comes off looking worse than one might expect, while Japan, long in the mire of recession, not as badly as one might assume. True, this little examination may seem misplaced now that Resona Bank, Japan's fifth biggest, has been extended a Y2 trillion...
Relevance: 2.9456751
Power & Market
Online Publish Date: November 21, 2019
The US federal government is divided up into a variety of institutions, with the three main "branches" of government designed to compete against each other. Theoretically, these three branches were initially thought to place checks on the other branches of government, thus minimizing abuses of power by the federal government overall.
Things haven't really worked out that way. Thanks to the rise...