Statism is the primary theme of this year’s election. The political issues of the day are all approached from the interventionist point of view. For George Bush and Al Gore, it is not a matter of whether government should be running a social security scheme or not. It is only a matter of how government might save it. In the realm of health care,
Enron is probably still too new to draw final conclusions about what it all means. There is still too much of the tale yet to be told. Like drinking a wine that has not yet been properly aged, we risk missing the full range of flavor by rushing to pass judgment on the Enron debacle. Over time, our view of this event may be quite different from
One change in the fabric of American finance that is particularly striking over the years is the proliferation of credit and the growth of nonbank financing. The primary creditors of the nation’s debtors are not banks, but are so-called nontraditional lenders--such as GE Capital, the financial services arm of General Electric (which,
A popular view advocates that the Fed should manage the economy so as to keep inflation in check, while also being on guard against deflation. In this view, prices must not rise too much or fall too much, but rather stay within some happy median. To borrow an oft-used expression, the ideal is seen as sort of a ‘Goldilocks economy’—not too hot and
Economic debates seem to have their own growing seasons. For stretches of time they may disappear, only to reappear in later years covering the same old ground again. The debate about the effects of deficits on interest rates, though temporarily stunted by the frosty winters of the Clinton years with its visions of budget surpluses, is back with
It may still be too early to pen the postmortem on the New Economy. The final chapters on that episode are still being written. Nonetheless, Leon Levy’s discursive memoir, The Mind of Wall Street, is a first cut, perhaps inadvertently so, at disentangling some of the threads that helped create the great bull market of recent vintage. Levy is a
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” - Shakespeare, Macbeth Humphrey Neill’s little gem of a book, The Art of Contrary Thinking , was groundbreaking in at least one respect. Published in 1954, it gave the English-speaking world a new word, at least according to the lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary .
The consultation of oracles, a practice long thought dead, continues today in many forms, perhaps in a more subtle and less institutionalized than during antiquity, but powerfully nonetheless. In Michael Wood’s new book, The Road to Delphi, he explores this “extended metaphorical afterlife of oracles”. Wood draws primarily from history and
“The world is in permanent monetary crisis,” Murray Rothbard once observed (in Making Economic Sense ), “but once in a while, the crisis flares up acutely, and we noisily shift gears from one flawed monetary system to another.” Monetary systems built on floating fiat currencies are fragile things. Most of the world currently operates under this
Since the end of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, the dollar has been an irredeemable currency, no longer defined or measured in terms of gold. Nonetheless, in an ironic twist, it has become the world’s dominant currency and the core reserve asset of central banks all over the world. It has replaced gold as an international currency. 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.