The original theory behind state-supported television was that it would give voice to those excluded from the marketplace. After all, commercial television’s interests are not necessarily in line with the national interest. What about the millions of the poor, benighted Americans who don’t fit into the few demographic targets that commercial
Government figures put US savings at 0.3% of income. Two recent articles ( Are Spendthrift Americans Really the Problem? in the New York Times , and A Savings Crisis? Maybe Not in Business Week , state that the alleged low savings rate in the US is either mis-measured or not a problem anyway. The charge of mis-measurement may carry some weight.
A brief obituary appears in the New York Times , courtesy of The Associated Press: “ Robert Heilbroner, 85, Economist and Writer, Dies .” Absent from this brief death notice is, perhaps, one of Heilbroner’s most famous formulations. Upon the collapse of 20th century socialism, he said: “ Mises was right
Nick Gillespie at Reason is “not a raving fan of Social Security ‘privatization’ for a number of reasons. Among them: I don’t like the idea of forced savings, period; to the extent that SS taxes go into the general fund and subsidize guaranteed state pensions/minimum incomes, they should be named as such; the amount of money under any plan that
Ask the typical undergraduate to discuss the ideas advanced in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and you may as well be asking for an overview of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Yet these nearly forgotten documents fully merit a place among the most important political writings in American history, both in terms of
Yesterday it was revealed that the US trade deficit rose sharply in November, to a record high $60.3 billion, an increase of $4.3 billion against the upwardly revised $56 billion in October and also far higher than the consensus estimate of $54 billion. And it was a sharp increase against the $40 billion deficit in November 2003. That caused the
An obscure regulatory agency, the OFHEO, has succeeded in bringing down one of the politically savviest and most well-connected figures in the Washington, Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. An OFEHO investigation revealed that Fannie Mae had been violating rules concerning derivatives accounting, and that the resulting mis-statements in their
Kevin Brancato at Truck&Barter posts a few paragraphs from his dissertation that deal with Mises and index numbers. “No aprioristic theory exists to determine the exact outcomes of changes in law that apply to the economic system. In fact, Mises is fine with data, as long as you are not trying to construct economic theory out of it. If one is
It seems that the FBI can’t get its $170 million computer system to work right . So of course it will spend $2 million to evaluate the problems. While this evaluation takes place, “the bulk of the internal reports and documents produced at the F.B.I. must still be printed, signed and scanned by hand into computer format each
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.