Mises Wire

A selection from Chapter 42 of Economic Controversies.

An interesting theme in a 2014 documentary on electronic music (recently added to Netflix instant place), I Dream of Wires, is the tension between two different philosophies of developing electronic music technology. At the one end of the spectrum were the purist avant-garde musicians who worked primarily with very expensive and hard-to-use equipment that was a large departure from already established types of music-making. At the other end of the spectrum were the "commercial musicians" who wanted to make electronic music, but also wanted an interface that was easy to use.

Many governments — including the US — have often inhumanely forbidden families from supplying ransoms to kidnappers to save loved ones. The Obama administration recently, and correctly, suspended the practice of prosecuting families in these cases.

The crash of 1929 came after a decade of interventionist politics following world War I. "Free markets" were blamed anyway. Decades later, we pursue even more interventionism, and when it fails, we blame "free markets" all over again.

There's no Platonic laboratory where "pure" science happens independent of human ideas, motivations, and institutions.

Damian McBride is the former head of communications at the British treasury and former special adviser to Gordon Brown, erstwhile Prime Minister of

Markets are heading dow

Back in March, Peter Brockvar observed that even when the economy seemed to be doing

In this interview, Jim Grant nicely sums in a few minutes the basic problem of using asset price inflation in pursuit of economic enterprise. The problem is this strategy puts the cart before the horse.

Today's discomfiting 1,000 point drop in the DJIA may be the next in a series of shocks for worldwide equity markets. But given the growth in the Federal Reserve Bank's monetary base, US stocks may have a long way down left to go.