In my previous article , I looked at how government regulations have created an an uneven playing field that favors natural gas and oil over coal. This time, we’ll look at how regulators favor some types of “renewable” energy over others while biasing the system against nuclear energy. Wind and Solar Favored Over Bioenergy Renewable energy
Sometimes terrible things happen without any human malfeasance, and the novel Wuhan coronavirus may in fact be one of those things. It is entirely plausible the virus emerged from “ wet markets “ in the Hubei Province of China rather than as a fumbled (or worse, intentionally released) bioweapon cooked up by the Xi Jinping government. We may
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fourth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors
Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Democratic Party’s primary this week, but not before he spent more than $500 on political advertisements. According to Bloomberg (the news service, not the man), Through Friday [Feb 21], he’s spent $505.8 million on broadcast, cable, radio and digital ads, according to Advertising Analytics. That’s an average
Many anticapitalist ideologies have long relied on the idea that capitalist oppressors use advertising to force/compel/trick people into purchasing goods and services “they don’t need.” Advertising, the theory goes, is a tool employed by the capitalists to exercise power against the workers. Left to their own devices, workers would save more money
Last week, the Federal Reserve responded to Wall Street’s coronavirus panic with an “emergency” interest rate cut. This emergency cut failed to revive the stock market, leading to predictions that the Fed will again cut rates later this month. More rate cuts would drive interest rates to near, or even below, zero. Lowering interest rates punishes
The Federal Reserve announced today that it will aggressively begin injecting liquidity into the market again. From the New York Fed’s website : Beginning Thursday, March 12, 2020 and continuing through Monday, April 13, 2020, the Desk will offer at least $175 billion in daily overnight repo operations and at least $45 billion in two-week term
Everywhere one looks there seems to be panic about the coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Prevention, the World Health Organization, and now the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases almost seems to be encouraging a frenzied response with their statements on the illness. Luckily Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust, an emergency physician at
Beltway libertarian economists are today hailing the Fed’s efforts to cure the economic crisis or are even suggesting they intervene to a greater extent to quell fears in markets. That is like saying we need to spread the coronavirus to more people to stop the pandemic. The Fed created the economic crisis with its more than a decade–long campaign
In his magisterial Crisis and Leviathan , Robert Higgs shows that the growth of government in the twentieth century can largely be explained by patterns of crisis and response. These crises can be real (World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, stagflation) or imagined (inequality, the various isms). In either case new government programs,
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.