Hosting the Olympic Games isn’t as popular as it used to be. This week, Boston cancelled its bid to host the 2024 summer Olympics. The city was forced to cancel the effort in response to opposition to what The Nation called the “debt, displacement, and militarization of public space” that the Olympics brings to every host city. Basically, the
At one Colorado gold mine: Cash costs amounted to $482 per ounce in the first quarter, compared to a company-wide average of $619. Not surprisingly, the number of humans required to dig out an ounce of gold is just a fraction of what it was in the good ‘ol days, and today’s average gold miner (in the industrialized world, at least) has a much
Some errors die hard. In today’s CNN Money, an interview with economist David Rosenberg featured this distortion: The crisis came about because of excessive leverage, a misunderstanding of credit quality as linked to securitized products, and a general lack of appreciation for risk. Thanks to years of deregulation, the government created a wild
UPDATE: Bizarrely, some readers have tried to argue, in the comments here and at Facebook, that people are only upset because the lion hunt noted here was illegal. That was obviously always untrue, and has now been confirmed by the fact that the outrage is nearly intense in response to photos posted by a hunter named Sabrina Corgatelli. Corgatelli
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been pressing for more military spending in Japan, in what critics claim is a violation of Japan’s so-called pacifist constitution. Foreign Policy reports : In January, the government of conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe endorsed a defense budget of nearly 5 trillion yen, or $42 billion,
One of the benefits of the present depression is the fact that the voters are grumpier than usual. It’s hard to care about your carbon footprint when you don’t have a job, and it’s now even possible to criticize the federal reserve without being deemed insane. Yet now, even the most hallowed government-corporate scheme of all, taxpayer-funded
I thought this photo (below) from July 2015 did an especially good job of capturing the camaraderie between Joe and his Summer Fellowship students at the Mises Institute. Summer Fellows arrive in May each year and stay through Mises University in late July, working on articles, dissertations, and other research while being able to work closely
Per Bylund writes in The Orange County Register : New technologies fascinate us – from the precision of robotic surgery to the potential of Amazon dropping packages on our doorsteps via drone. But at the same time, there is anxiety over robots and artificial intelligence making human labor unnecessary and, ultimately, replacing us. Fear of the
The Puerto Rican government has defaulted on its debt. USNews reports : Puerto Rico failed to meet a $58 million debt repayment deadline Monday, triggering one of the most significant municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The U.S. territory managed to round up about $628,000 to make a partial interest payment to bondholders, according to
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.