Mises Wire

Today would have been Burt Blumert's ninety-second birthday

There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose government minimum wage laws, but there is one objection making the rounds that is based on bad economics and should be avoided, and that’s the "businesses will pass on the costs to consumers" objection.

An unheralded work on the Austrian business cycle that rivals the work of the greats is Jesús Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, which outlines a multistate process of boom and bust. 

Placing thousands of troops on the streets of the nation’s capital could be a ticking time bomb. The longer the National Guard is deployed in Washington, the greater the peril of a Kent State–caliber catastrophe. 

The claim that the US needs an immense and varied nuclear arsenal "does serve one purpose: it keeps military budgets wondrously high."

Democrats want taxpayer funding for the families of those who died of covid. But, of course, there's no discussion of helping those who died as a result of covid lockdowns, such as those who were denied medical treatment for cancer. 

The opening pages of the new decade feel like we’re living through a combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

It is only through the increase in capital goods, i.e., through the enhancement and the expansion of the infrastructure, that labor can become more productive and earn a higher hourly wage. 

Centrally planned economies often stick with terrible ideas for many years. But markets can take bad products, learn from them, and turn them into great products that give the public what it wants and needs.

In the United States, the two-party system of the old days is seemingly still preserved. But this is only a camouflage of the real situation. In fact, the political life of the United States is determined by the struggle and aspirations of pressure groups.