Mises Wire

When governments devalue the currency to push more exports, the country is getting rich in terms of foreign currency, but it is getting poor in terms of real wealth.

The world doesn't follow predictable patterns based on averages of long-term probability. Ordinary people apparently know this better than statisticians do.

Taleb maintains he’s a statistically-oriented orthodox economist. But I don’t think he understands what people mean by “orthodoxy.”

Negative rates, higher taxes, and inflation – the statists are employing every measure to gain access to the fruits of your labor.

Since no specific victim and no specific crime has been identified, this is no case of reparation as exists under real justice. It is simply a transfer of wealth from one group to another based on some sort of general "exploitation." 

John Rawls claimed "justice" demands governments use their power to benefit the least well off in a given society. But then he arbitrarily restricts the scope of these programs to particular nation-states. This betrays a fundamental problem with his idea of inequality.

In a world of demanding and ever-changing consumers, there is always a way to do things better, with greater quality, and at a lower price. Entrepreneurs must learn how to do this, or they will lose out to those who can.

If capitalism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it — and its discovery would be rightly regarded as one of the great triumphs of the human mind.

Jeff Deist pithily describes Taleb’s prose as “Rothbard meets Hayek.” But Taleb shares some ideas in common with Ludwig von Mises as well.

Thanksgiving started out as a terribly political holiday. But it has gotten better with age as more people have been interested in beer and football than in politics.