Mises Wire

Like during the 1930s, governments are turning to new programs and schemes that will only prolong the crisis and makes things worse.

The division of labor promotes peaceful exchange and continues peace. But this can all break down when governments intervene to prevent peaceful interaction and when government incompetence promotes violence.

Did the hardliners win at Versailles because the Americans were too weak with the flu to object? If so, it would be just one way that disease profoundly affected public policy in the wake of the 1918 flu.

Michael Sandel doesn't like capitalism. But he can't seem to manage an economic argument for why. He's content to claim that capitalism is morally corrupting, converting anticapitalism into a sort of pseudoreligious faith.

Some conservatives increasingly reject America's well-established classical liberal traditions of laissez-faire and free choice. These conservatives insist that we need a strong state to "make America great again." They're wrong.

When the current panic and crisis began, we were already in the late stages of a long asset price bubble. The crisis has exposed the fragility of the current system and we won't be going back to where we were before.

Mises points out that eugenicists’ aim to improve the “quality” of the human race is an incoherent and meaningless goal: there exists no clear and objective standard by which the quality of human beings can be measured.

Legal arbitration only makes sense when all parties involved voluntarily enter into a contract. With police arbitration, the public has no seat at the table. It's a system designed to protect police only.

If current political and economic trends continue, the 2020s will usher in a new period of drastically increased government activity and regulation of the economy.

The assumption that an exchange presumes some sort of equality has been a delusion of economic theory since Aristotle.