This week 84 years ago just 35 days after the stock market crash of 1929, the 400 room Baker Hotel opened at Mineral Wells in Palo Pinto County, Texas. The fourteen-story Baker Hotel was the first skyscraper built outside a metropolitan area. The hotel was only profitable during wars (there was a military base nearby) and during political
Starting in January, Robert P. Murphy will teach Basics of Economics: Introduction to the Free Market . This course is for all ages, but is particularly suited for high schoolers. Another great resource for high schoolers is the book An Introduction to Economic Reasoning by David Gordon, parts of which will be assigned reading in Murphy’s
Mises.org readers were alerted to the housing bubble in Norway in January 2013 . It now appears that the bubble is starting to crash. Brokers have had to recalibrate after more than five years of a booming market where homes sold for as much as 50 percent above the asking price. During the peak, DNB Eiendom’s Dahl said she sold a property outside
The USA Today reports on the skyscraper building mania in New York City. Multiple building have been built or are under construction or planning that reach into the super skyscraper category although no new records heights are planned at this time. This seems like another indicator of the Skyscraper Curse. I explain the theoretical connection
Guest Post by Fernando Chiocca Economics and martial arts? One might be tempted to think that those two things can’t have anything in common. But there are some parallels that we can trace. First of all, both are types of systematic knowledge. The former is the study of human action and interaction with goods and services and the latter is the
[Editor’s Note: This is an old interview from the Harvard Political Review , reprinted here for the use of our readers and students.] Mark Thornton is an Austrian economist and senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian academic organization dedicated to scholarship of the Austrian School as inspired by Ludwig von Mises. In the
[I]t’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office. (Applause) This shouldn’t be an ideological question. It was Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, who once said, “They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of
This poll says that 72% of Americans now consider big government to be the biggest problem America faces, not big business or big labor. Austrian economists had long said that the battle against big government seems hopeless and then bang, the people wake up and you have an ideological revolution on your hands. HT:
We have been watching the Canadian Housing Bubble unfold for the last several years. Now someone is putting together a special fund to help wealthy Canadians hedge their bets against their real estate holding. The idea for the fund is based explicitly on the Austrian theory of the business
In Wednesday’s Mises Daily article, Gary Galles explained how there’s no way to predict the many new ways the marketplace can create, deliver, and sustain amazing new things. This is why freedom is so essential. The impossibility of planning innovation is shown quite well in this 1995 column by a very smart person who predicted the internet would
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.