Well it’s about time. The headline on Monday’s CNBC article announces: “Investors Starting to Believe That Inflation Threat is Real.” For some time, I have been a proud member of the fuddy duddies who have been predicting the return of serious stagflation . Thus far, our prognostications have clearly been half -right — the “real economy” is indeed
The news abounds with arguments and even riots over so-called austerity measures. Whether in the Middle East, Europe, or even certain US states, the public is realizing just how deep a hole various governments have dug for themselves. In this article I’ll outline Uncle Sam’s position and then explain why it’s such a problem. A Shocking Chart I
Last week I testified before a Congressional subcommittee on the Fed’s role in rising gasoline prices. All of the economists on the panel agreed that oil prices were rising (partly) because of the dollar’s fall against other currencies. However, Dean Baker — prominent Keynesian pundit and codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research —
The end is near. The end, that is, of the current monetary system. But inflation or deflation? Dow 1,000 or wheelbarrow money? While the arguments on the deflation side are not entirely without merit, they rely on conceptual errors that result in exaggerating the magnitude of a possible deflation. The primary error of the deflation camp is the
Once again, the nation has been graced with the mothering wing of its congressional collective. The Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act (CARTA) passed the House with a whopping 334-90 tally, opening the doors to unbridled regulatory madness in the wake of Arthur Andersen’s Enron-related transgressions.
In a previous article—” Denmark: Potemkin Village “—I documented the downside to Denmark. Despite its reputation as a showcase of political utopia, 40 percent of its adult population live on government transfer income, full-time, all-year. A little more than a third of these people are pensioners and the rest are working age. About one third of
Space travel has been one center of interest of governments around the world for the last five decades. As a result of an unending interest in nationalized technological advancement, research and development, incomparable military capabilities, and scientific endeavors into the unknown, bureaucracies have conned entire governments, if not much of
This letter appeared in the Wall Street Journal , December 10, 1998 Bankrupt Socialist Contraption Your Dec. 1 editorial about Social Security (”The GOP Tax Increase”) is, like much of the debate over Social Security, unclear in its assumptions and disingenuous in its conclusion, specifically the idea that raising taxes is not inextricably linked
Free-market economists like myself attack government tax-and-spend policies as being damaging to prosperity, accusing the government of “sucking money” or “leeching resources” out of the economy. We claim that taxes damage not only the welfare of the person from whom they are taken, but the whole country. Politicians, supporters of state spending,
“We have progressively abandoned the freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.” (F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom ). Economic thinking today is divided into many schools of thought, such as the following : the Keynesians, the Post- Keynesians, the Rational Expectations School, the
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.