Mises Wire

How can paternalists say that when they make it more difficult for you to smoke they aren’t interfering with your freedom? They've come up with a bizarre rationale.

The Fed's balance sheet has risen to $4.1 trillion from $3.7 trillion in August. Nomi Prins discusses what this policy shift means and what it portends for 2020.

Central banks have done nothing to end the boom-and-bust cycle. Instead, their unscrupulous interventions in credit markets just prolong the boom. But it's a huge mistake to assume that bringing market interest rates to zero will create a perpetual boom.

In portraying the state as an integral part of economy and society, advocates of "state capacity libertarianism" ignore the state's unique political, i.e., predatory, nature.

Uncritically holding democracy out as an ideal overlooks the question of whether market democracy or political democracy better serves citizens.

The task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out—the top-down management of various ethnic, regional, and social groups—had always been the main task of empires. The US now imposes this both domestically and globally.

It is not money that funds economic activity, but the saved pool of consumer goods. The existence of money only facilitates the flow of savings. Any attempt to replace savings with money ends in economic disaster.

Terrence Malick's new film about conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter is a subtle film. But perhaps too much so, and we need to look deeper to understand why this one man so vehemently resisted the Nazi state at the cost of his own life.

The North American fur trade is in decline. Unfortunately, many think that the solution is for the government to step in to “protect” trappers from market competition.

Why do we have money in the first place? Where does it come from, and what determines its form? What qualities make for a good money? What role do banks play—is it something other than what money itself does for us?