He may not be a household name, but the letter Senator Joe Manchin (D) from West Virginia wrote to the Federal Reserve chair Thursday is worthy of consideration. The notable part is where he writes: With the recession over and our strong economic recovery well underway, I am increasingly alarmed that the Fed continues to inject record amounts of
In a follow up to his recent Mises Wire article, “ Paying People Not to Work Won’t Make Us Richer ,” Paul Prentice explains in more detail why monetary and fiscal “stimulus” won’t fix the
Every quarter this past year I’ve provided updates on the stock holdings of the Swiss National Bank (SNB). Comment sections, internet chat boards, social media, and various articles about the bank reveal many people don’t understand the significance of its anticapitalist actions nor the problems this creates. Understand, the SNB is not a “bank” in
While talk today of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that touched off the Great Recession tends to center mainly around the failure of regulators or bad individual actors at the level of banks and lenders, we should not forget that it was Fed policy from 1993 to 2005 that created the crucial conditions for the ultimate collapse. Put simply, the
Plenty has been written about financial transaction taxes (FTTs), mostly arguing over the politically charged issue of who pays: Main Street or Wall Street. Largely absent from the conversation have been the risk transfer (RT) markets—futures and options. RT is a massive, largely unappreciated economic phenomenon that could be severely impacted
Beginning in the early 1700s, a hitherto rather peripheral group of Native Americans called the Comanche swept into a vast area comprising much of what is now the southwestern United States, creating an empire that spanned parts of the modern states of Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In the process they dispossessed rival Native
It is hard not to notice the Biden administration’s clear demonstration of their disregard for Americans’ property rights and the Constitution. All one needs to do is read the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause while considering Biden’s extension of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium. Why? It did so despite
Sociologist Mike Savage’s new book, The Return of Inequalilty , is the latest in a long line of unsuccessful attempts to demonize and eliminate inequality. James R. Rogers provides an interesting and useful discussion of it in his review, “ Is Inequality a Problem? ” on the Law and Liberty website. But what I was most struck by was the picture
The collapse of the American-backed state in Afghanistan brings home the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s essay “The Death of a State,” written in July 1975. The lessons that Rothbard drew from the fall of South Vietnam apply equally to the present crisis. Among these were the importance of guerilla warfare, the dependence of all states on majority
This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted
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.