Libby Emmons and David Marcus at the New York Post put a spotlight on the ongoing crusade against the gig economy. They began by citing California Assembly Bill 5 , which was designed to put the clamps on the gig economy. Ostensibly marketed as a bill to reign in rideshare companies like Uber by forcing them to provide independent contractors the
Joe’s excellent critique of “state capacity libertarianism” picks up on something I also noticed when reading Tyler Cowen’s piece. As Joe puts it, Cowen’s ideal state is “a nonmarginal actor whose task is to achieve certain collective outcomes intuited by Cowen or some other political philosopher.” Cowen provides a laundry list of societal
Dr. Joe Salerno recently penned a response to economist Tyler Cowen’s call for “S tate Capacity Libertarianism .” It’s a very important essay, and I encourage you to read it. It gets to the heart of a very important and broad question in America today, namely whether what we can call the ”managerial capitalism” of the twentieth and early
The slump in energy commodities and copper shows the fragility of the global economy and the risks to the consensus’s reflation trade. It is easy to blame the recent fall of commodity prices on the coronavirus outbreak, but the weakness was already evident before the outbreak. This epidemic cannot be detached from an event that has not grabbed
From the time I was an undergraduate, I can remember reading many articles by Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). I found his insights valuable enough that I eventually wrote a book, The Apostle of Peace , about what I considered were his best sustained arguments. Many of his shorter arguments were not included.
The public still doesn’t know who won the Iowa caucuses . Maybe the leaders of the Democratic Party don’t know either. But there’s an important lesson here: if one’s political process is founded on votes counted through a phone app, or a “direct recording electronic” (DRE) voting machine, centralized technical control of the system raises the risk
Last night’s State of the Union was particularly noteworthy for its showmanship. Scholarships were given away, medals were awarded, families reunited. At a time when national politics is bad theater, President Trump is clearly its most gifted star. Trump also knows what sells. As a political figure, he’s motivated not by any consistent ideology,
In the free-for-all that has been the 2020 presidential campaign so far, there has been a notable absence of serious concern for liberty. The idea that gave birth to our country has been largely crowded out by spirited efforts to outdo rivals in what H.L. Mencken called an “advance auction of stolen goods.” But those who prize liberty have a great
In response to the economic paralysis brought about by the coronavirus, the Chinese central bank has pumped $243 billion into financial markets. On Monday, February 3, 2020, China’s equity market shed $393 billion of its value. Most experts are of the view that in order to counter the damage that the coronavirus has inflicted, loose monetary
Today would have been the ninety-first birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends, and when you
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.