An excerpt from his post at Freebanking.org, Something Nice about Austrian Economics : I know, I know: I haven’t been terribly kind to Austrian economics on this blog, or rather, I have been positively unkind to certain sorts of Austrian economists, and especially to Late Pleistocene types who insist, on a-priori grounds (and against all sorts of
The great James Grant appeared on CNBC yesterday to discuss the latest Fed statement that removed any mention of prospective dates for raising interest rates. In his own inimitable style, Mr. Grant proceeded to eviscerate the fundamental premise of central banks, namely that prosperity can be created via monetary expansion. Among his best lines:
Uber, Lyft, and similar rideshare companies represent a direct threat to state-controlled taxi cartels and their ( increasingly unsellable ) medallions. Now a class action lawsuit against Uber has been cleared for a federal court jury in California, alleging that its drivers should be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. If
Vineer Bhansali at PIMCO argues that negative-yielding bonds act more like insurance policies than financial assets: Indeed, negative-yielding bond markets tend to behave more like insurance policies than as investment assets. This is because, with a negative zero-coupon bond, a fixed income investor, like an insurance policy buyer, pays up front
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders recently raised the ire of both progressives and libertarians with his remarks concerning immigration: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,” Sanders said. “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.” “It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re
The recent hacking of the hugely popular website Ashley Madison raises uncomfortable questions about privacy and security in our digital lives. For those unfamiliar with AshleyMadison.com, it functions as a dating site specifically aimed at those seeking to “cheat” on their spouse or partner. Needless to say, the promise of discretion is a key
Governments, at least modern western governments, have always hated cash. Cash is private, and cash transactions are hard to tax. As Joe Salerno explains, the US fedgov’s relentless War on Cash has been ongoing . Now one of the primary weapons in that War, the misnamed Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, has targeted a prominent retired politician. When I
The much-hyped Thomas Piketty has given an interview to Die Zeit in which he lambastes Germany as hypocritical on the issue of Greek debt repayment. It’s fascinating and astonishing to witness. The great centralizers seem surprised that yoking together wildly different nations, economies, languages, and cultures doesn’t work. This is what Mr.
Paul-Martin Foss at the Carl Menger Center for the Study of Money and Banking has penned a nice retort to Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, who recently criticized Rand Paul’s introduction of an “Audit the Fed” bill in the US Senate. “Mr. Fisher apparently has forgotten that that same untrustworthy Congress created the Federal Reserve
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard details the increasing level of Greek defiance to its ECB overlords in the wake of a left-wing, populist uprising in recent Greek elections. It has become blatantly obvious that the political, legal, fiscal, regulatory, and monetary centralization project known as the EU has increased rather than decreased nationalist
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.