Crony Capitalism in the United States (Economist.com): The mortgage markets may now be mature enough not to need Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac any more. Certainly, the two companies think that they have outgrown their original brief. Both have moved away from buying, packaging and selling mortgages towards retaining them instead. Because they can
People variously comment on the wonderful charts that appear on Mises.org. Frank Shostak and Sean Corrigan do their own, but many of the others come from a fabulous resource for free data and charts: www.economagic.com . Try it out! Everyone in Europe seems so unhappy about the dollar’s slide. www.Money.Cnn.com is suddenly worried that the entire
Tallying up the government payroll used to be a somewhat reliable way to measure the size of government. No longer: contracting out has become more common. Under this system, the government decides what needs to be done, the taxpayers pay the bill, and the profits land in private hands. Some people call it privatization, or we might just call it
Bush Urges Free Trade, says a headline on CNN . But it turns out the free trade he supports works a lot like global weflare and mercantilism: “Bush has announced a 50 percent increase in U.S. development aid and pledged $15 billion to fight AIDS, a disease which has decimated the working-age population in some African countries.... The United
Valery Giscard d’Estaing has written a constitution for the EC that is highly revealing in the sense that it shows how far Europe has departed from the liberalism that gave rise to its civilization to the liberalism that posits societies run by managerial states. Matt Scofield has posted an interesting critique: Roadmap to Fleece. “In this vein
Letter to Mises.org: I read Steve Forbes’s Fact and Comment column in Forbes Magazine, June 9, 2003, specifically the items headlined “ Deflation: The Fast, Easy Cure “ and “Dumb Debate.” He clearly thought that deflation is bad for the economy. He seemed to think that one should strike a balance between inflation and deflation. He wrote that
LewRockwell.com has a new blog you will also enjoy. As this item points out, the LRC rating is 770, which beats Washington Times and National Review. Meanwhile, the new Mises.org ratings are in, showing this site ahead of OpinionJournal, as well as the UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.
Already, there is controversy about the EU constitution’s attempt to increase labor costs by discouraging temps. Christopher Westley discusses why temp employment exists and why unions hate it.
After weeks in which Bush administration spokesmen have said that the weak dollar is actually a blessing, Bush has told a Russian TV station : “[T]he marketplace is making decisions as to whether the dollar should be strong or not. Our policy is a strong dollar. And we believe that good fiscal and monetary policy will cause our economy to grow and
Many commentators suggested that oil was the real reason for the war on Iraq. If so, no one anticipated that after the war, US firms would have a hard time gaining access for one simple reason: Iraq is not safe (MSNBC).
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.