Mises Wire

Thanks to Per Bylund for organizing this excellent session

With recent DC politicking on both the Export-Import Bank and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we revisit Ron Paul's 1981 essay "The Case for Free Trade" which explains the basics of truly free trade:

Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon. But what the German economists used to call, in a narrower connection, Das AdamSmithProblem, is much more severe than that. For the problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics.

Interestingly, Amazon's list of best sellers in the "monetary policy" category is a veritable parade of anti-Fed and anti-central bank books. 

No amount of power to coerce others can make a life meaningful for good. As Eric Hoffer realized, only freedom can provide that opportunity. It does not guarantee a meaningful life; only the possibility. But to create or preserve that possibility, we need to bolster freedom. And as he also recognized, “Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power…where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.”

"It is a great comfort to every administration to be able to make its citizens happy by spending. For public opinion will then attribute the resulting boom to its current rulers." 

Dan Beard used to be commissioner of the US Bureau of Reclamation. Now he's calling for the Bureau of Reclamation — the government agency that built dams throughout the west and controls water allocation to this day — to be abolished. 

Vineer Bhansali at PIMCO argues that negative-yielding bonds act more like insurance policies than financial assets:

Indeed, negative-yielding bond markets tend to behave more like insurance policies than as investment assets. This is because, with a negative zero-coupon bond, a fixed income investor, like an insurance policy buyer, pays up front for protection-- in this case a premium-- for expected principal return in the form of a return of less principal at the negative rate.

Contemporary supporters of an expanded role for government are increasingly moving away from calling themselves liberals toward referring to themse

It is hardly a relief for British households that £100 worth of consumer goods will now cost them around £99.90, when other prices in the UK economy are experiencing a rapid inflation.