All of us who warmly remember Animal House can recall the scene at the end in which the band is trying to walk through the wall at the end of the alley, having been led there by one of the pranksters from Delta House. Obviously, like the rest of the movie, this moment is an absurdity, but nonetheless I can think of no better way to describe Paul
As one who has made a career out of criticizing government and exposing the various predations of government, one would think I would be intelligent and wise enough not to expect that entity we know as “good government.” In fact, given that I am quite familiar with the entire socialist calculation debate and have assigned numerous papers covering
In a politicized society, it seems to me that the true believers really don’t have conversations as much as they deliver monologues of talking points. For example, a colleague of mine recently told me that “global warming” has become such a crisis that “new hurricanes are being created every 13 seconds.” This would mean that more than a million
According to Paul Krugman, it was adherence to the Gold Standard that helped push the United States into depression in the 1930s. What I find interesting, however, is the mentality he exposes about himself as he presents his case for wild inflation: What E&T (Eichengreen and Temin) show is that circa 1930 key decision-makers had spent so many
Paul Krugman, who tells us that assets and capital are homogeneous when it comes to economic policy, suddenly claims that there were malinvestments during the boom! (Actually, he does not use the M-word, as he would not know what it means, but I digress.) The Great One writes: Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into
According to Paul Krugman, who wrote in The Return of Depression Economics that governments can solve almost any crisis simply by printing money, declares that California easily could solve its present crisis by raising taxes . First, he goes into the “real” cause of the trouble: Proposition 13. The only problem is that it was passed more than 30
Some French tourists “mistakenly” got into an “unlicensed” taxi after arriving at JFK Airport, so New York police chased the van for several miles, putting the lives of everyone in danger before the driver crashed the van. The AP dispatch makes it sound as though the police were heroes and the van driver was a villain: Plainclothes police
According to Jim Cramer, Ben Bernanke has saved us all: Jim Cramer says history will recognize Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as the primary reason America avoided a much more serious meltdown as the housing market and rotten banking investments forced the economy to halt last year. “I’ll just come right out and say it: Ben Bernanke will go down as the
Lawrence Moss, who was a wonderful fellow traveler of the Austrian School and the editor of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology , has passed away. The arrangements for a memorial service for him are incomplete, but I spoke to his widow tonight, Widdy Ho, and gave her my condolences. Larry edited the book The Economics of Ludwig von
In writing about socialist medical care like they have in Canada, one of my points has been that socialist systems tend to be undercapitalized, as in such a system, capital becomes a liability rather than an asset. For example, the county where I work has about 80,000 residents and has as many MRI machines as does Montreal, which has several
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.