Congress and the president have adopted many critically important policies in great haste during brief periods of perceived national emergency. During the first “hundred days” of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in the spring of 1933, for example, the government abandoned the gold standard, enacted a system of wide-ranging controls, taxes,
When Governor Isaac Stevens went around Puget Sound in the mid-1850s making treaties with the Indian tribes to clear the way for an anticipated influx of whites, he found again and again that asking for the tribal chief got him nowhere. The Indians would look around and shrug their shoulders. They had no chiefs. Like many North American Indian
Joseph Salerno writes in today’s Mises Daily: In fact, economists are finally beginning to rediscover Mises’s explanation of the prolonged mass unemployment of the 1930s. For example, UCLA economist Lee Ohanian in his recent paper, “What—or Who—Started the Great Depression,” argues that Hoover’s policies of propping up wages and encouraging work
This point came up in the Mises Academy “Interwar Years” course yesterday evening. One of the most significant background events of the First World War and the wake of the war was of course the Spanish Flu. We used to say that twenty million died worldwide, but recent studies are showing that at least fifty million died, and the death toll may
by Michael S. Rozeff The U.S. has lost manufacturing jobs, and it is not due to increases in productivity in manufacturing or because there is a natural maturation into a services economy. The main reason is the freeing up of labor forces in Asia, particularly China, due to their political reforms. Reforms in China, or movement toward greater free
Writing in the Wall Street Journal on December 23 , Robert Lucas expresses approval of the Fed’s latest reduction of its target range for the Federal Funds Rate to approximately zero, calling it “welcome.” Lucas notes that this policy does not leave the Fed without the ability to inject additional reserves into the banking system, because it can
The world probably would have been much better off had macroeconomics never been devised. Although I have in mind Keynesian macroeconomics above all, I include other types of macro models as well. I even include, somewhat reluctantly, the whole quantity theory approach descended from David Hume to the Friedmanites, now known as monetarism. One of
In his justly famous 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , Joseph A. Schumpeter described the dynamics of a market economy as a process of “creative destruction.” In his view, innovation—“the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist
Robert Fogel died a few days ago. He was a prominent figure in the academic economic history profession for five decades, virtually from the time he burst onto the scene with the publication of a polished-up version of his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. dissertation, Railroads and American Economic Growth , in 1964. This book was the most impressive
EUCLIDEAN GEOMETER: Given the standard axioms of Euclidean geometry, I have proved that the interior angles of a triangle always sum to 180 degrees. AUSTRIAN ECONOMIST: Okay. MAINSTREAM NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIST: I regard the proposition that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees as a testable hypothesis. I have obtained a $15.8
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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.