Dana Milbank doesn’t like Paul Ryan’s budget proposal that was released this week. Why? Well, Ryan cuts spending on the poor in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Milbank writes : Paul Ryan, outlining his latest budget proposal in the House TV studio Tuesday morning, said the policies of the Republican presidential nominees “perfectly
Just one visit to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar tells a visitor how Turks store value. The Turkish monetary authorities have a history of debauching their currency so Turks store their wealth in gold and rugs. There are 373 jewelers and 125 rug stores in the bazaar. In 1966, one US dollar bought 9 lire. By 2001, a dollar bought 1.65 million lire. Four
According to an NPR story, Insider-Trading Ban Passes Congress, But Some See Missed Opportunity , Senator Charles Grassley was unhappy with the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act recently passed by Congress because it didn’t go far enough. NPR reports that the Act, passed unanimously by the Senate, gained its political momentum from a 60
Bryan Caplan recently blogged about “the awful” John Stuart Mill, calling him ”shockingly muddled.” Rothbard, more than perhaps any other scholar, exposed Mill’s muddleheadedness and its likely roots. His verdict on Mill was that he was a “woolly minded man of mush” and his philosophy “a vast kitchen midden of diverse and contradictory
In his recent wonderful book, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School , Ralph Raico gives Eugen Richter (1830-1906), the neglected hero of authentic German liberalism, his due. As I read the chapter, I kept feeling as if I was reading about Ron Paul. Just as Ron Paul has been “Dr. No” in Congress, Richter was a veritable “ Herr Nein ” (or
Las Vegas has the reputation as being a libertarian city, but like anyplace else, certain business interests would rather use the force of government to stifle competition rather than compete in a free market. Cab drivers in Las Vegas have immense political power. In 2005, then Governor Kenny Guinn vetoed a bill that would have outlawed cabdrivers
Wladimir Kraus, a former Rowley Fellow at the Mises Institute, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “Essays on Reisman’s Net Consumption Theory of Profit and Interest” yesterday at the University of Aix-Marseille in southern France. Dr Kraus probably wrote the first PhD dissertation ever on George Reisman’s important treatise Capitalism
Retailer J.C. Penney just announced a new pricing policy that will make its prices more rigid and other retailers are moving in that direction. Can depression and mass unemployment be far behind? The linchpin of all varieties of Keynesian economics is the assumption that prices and wage rates are rigid and do not respond to changes in supply and
In the first chapter of Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School , Ralph Raico considers the connection between Austrian economics and laissez-faire. For the most part, the early Austrian economists Menger and Bohm-Bawerk, stuck to pure theory, and did not venture much into advocacy. Just how liberal they were is a fascinating question that
Ben Bernanke is starting to get his way. Matt Wirz writes for The Wall Street Journal that companies with junk credit ratings are bellying up to the debt trough like no other time in history. The first quarter of 2012 will go down as the most active for junk bond issuance since 1980 when Thomson Reuters began keeping track, with 130 companies
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.