Writes columnist James Pinkerton : Once upon a time, conservatives opposed God-playing hubris. The Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, wrote a book titled “The Fatal Conceit.” And what was that “fatal conceit”? It was the idea that “man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.” Hayek was no enemy of progress
Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs in the Boston Globe: Our government is going broke. The feds face bills that are far beyond our capacity to pay — by $44 trillion to be precise. The longer we ignore them, the bigger they get. Yet President Bush is working overtime to deepen our fiscal trap. This $44 trillion figure is not ours. Nor is it
Sean Corrigan writes: In a study of Britons’ savings habit (‘What saving habit?’ you might well ask!), Sainsbury’s Bank said that while people were generally advised to save between 10 and 15 per cent of their income, their research had found that the 12.4 million people who are in full-time work were saving just 4.7 per cent, while the 3.7
Writes Paul Krugman, so sound when not talking about economics : An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else — including scandals
Ramesh Ponnuru writing in National Review Online : “A dissenter from this view is George Selgin, an economist who teaches at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. Selgin challenges the view, commonly held on the right and in the center, that government should guarantee price stability. When productivity is increasing, he argues,
According to David Malpass writing in National Review Online : “There’s too much concern that the U.S. is heading into deflation. U.S. deflation was a policy problem in the late 1990s and caused the global recession of 2001. However, the U.S. departed sharply from Japan’s deflation path in 2001 and we’re now well into a reflation process. In the
Mr. R.A. writes: “While I tend to agree with you most of the time, your essay on the supposed benefits of deflation was uncharacteristically wide of the mark. The reason deflation is to be feared is that it will cause a global wave of bankruptcies, resulting in massive asset write-downs. The late C.V. Myers explained succinctly why: Ultimately,
A ”heraldic preference for war over peace may be indicated by a new eagle to the left of President Andrew Jackson’s portrait” on the new colored $20 bill, says Numismatic News (Collector.com)
“Radio tags the size of a grain of sand could be embedded in the euro note if a reported deal between the European Central Bank (ECB) and Japanese electronics maker Hitachi is signed,” says Winston Chai in CNET News.com
Andrew Zimbalist, the Robert A. Woods professor of economics at Smith College, toys with such far-out concepts as the abolition of all antitrust restrictions on baseball. Taken literally, without antitrust restrictions, ball clubs would presumably be free to locate wherever they wished. ‘’If monopoly sports leagues did not artificially regulate
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.