Bob Haber at Forbes has a short and sweet column warning about crazy conditions in the Vancouver real estate market. Prices for single-family detached homes have more than tripled just since 2002 in Canadian dollars, even with a Bank of Canada that has been far more circumspect in expanding its balance sheet than the Fed. But this time will be
Coinbase, the cryptocurrency trading platform, has been ordered by a federal court to turn over information sought by the IRS relating to more than 14,000 of the site’s users. As TechCrunch puts it, the IRS noticed “the number of tax returns claiming gains from virtual currency didn’t line up with the emerging popularity of digital currencies
Reactions to presidential budget proposals generally run along predictable party lines: the party occupying the White House lauds it as a sober and responsible reflection of the nation’s priorities, while the opposition party insists it will kill babies and bring about the general downfall of the nation. We might expect this political
George Orwell’s wonderful essay Politics and the English Language reads as true today as it must have in 1946, just a few years before smoking and tuberculosis would cut short his life. His exhortations against “meaningless words,” in particular, sound fresh today: Many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism now no meaning
The term “classical liberal” always has been a misnomer, in that it presupposes an earlier or undiluted form of liberalism that must be distinguished semantically and temporally when discussing liberalism today. But the great historian Ralph Raico disabused us of this empty distinction in his great book Classical Liberalism and the Austrian
With Trump poised to announce his pick for Fed Chair on Thursday, former Fed boss Paul Volcker quietly announced the forthcoming publication of his memoirs. Hopefully we will be spared a shamelessly self-serving title like Bernanke’s The Courage to Act . But in contrast to the fanfare surrounding post-retirement books by Alan Greenspan and
Apologies for the pay-walled link, but this Wall Street Journal article documenting the cheery fortunes of the Swiss National Bank really is remarkable. It’s remarkable not only because the SNB actively chose to pour hundreds of billions of Francs into foreign stock purchases, or because currency devaluation remains a cornerstone of Swiss
Articles about the tax exploits of global corporations generally are short on facts and long on innuendo. This recent missive from the Associated Press about Apple is a standard example of the genre: full of breathless accounts (Bermuda! Loose rules! Shelters!) that imply sinister motives behind standard business practices. Call it whatever you
National Review seems to think the recent election in Virginia was about Trump, when in fact it was entirely about demographics. Virginia is no longer a red state, and will become increasingly deeper blue in the decades ahead. This is why Romney lost in 2012, why Trump lost in 2016, why Ed Gillespie lost this week, and why future Ed
The rise of Trump has dredged up old and bitter debates surrounding the concept of ”America First,” a position Trump frequently advocates almost unconsciously and using his own peculiar terms. Consider this tweet, from 2013, as an example of Trump expressing a populist, America First sentiment regarding both domestic and foreign policy in a few
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.