Mises Wire

May 29 marks the 99th birthday of Arthur Seldon, a prolific defender of freedom against government control.

Thanks in part to the California Drought, people are starting to realize that water is not  a limitless resource, and that not even all those government subsidies and graft will make it so. But rapper Jay-Z has not gotten the memo. The NYT reports.

Altruism has commonly been held up as the standard for moral behavior, with those claiming to see deviations from altruism commonly condemning the

Economic populists have become skilled at causing economic calamities while escaping the blame. Instead, it’s the non-populists that end up picking up the pieces while getting the blame for the unemployment and wealth destruction that follows in the wake of populist economic policies.

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:

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.”

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.

"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."