A popular view advocates that the Fed should manage the economy so as to keep inflation in check, while also being on guard against deflation. In this view, prices must not rise too much or fall too much, but rather stay within some happy median. To borrow an oft-used expression, the ideal is seen as sort of a ‘Goldilocks economy’—not too hot and
Roosevelt-era farm policy lives! Consider: dairy farmers in northern New England dumped 80,000 pounds of fresh milk in a protest against low milk prices . The farmers evidently favor the price-support program that ended last year, because it worked as a kind of minimum wage program: keeping their incomes high and competitors out of the market. Now
According to a recently released report, the high cost of attending law school is making it hard for government agencies and “public interest”organizations to recruit good new lawyers. You may be inclined to laugh and say, “So what’s the problem?” but the report—” From Paper Chase to Money Chase ,” released by a group named Equal Justice
Bobbie Jean Harvey had a problem: She was quickly running out of gas. It was September 11, and four airliners had just been hijacked and slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Panicked customers were flocking to the two gas stations Ms. Harvey owns near Midland, Mich., to top off their tanks in case the supply of gas was disrupted.
The Free Market 20, no. 5 (May 2002) We are inundated by the forces of malevolence and deceit: terrorists, lying CEOs, stock hustlers, power-mad politicians, conniving regulators, conspiring pressure groups, and paid-off pundits. They seem to be everywhere. Revelations about Enron and its political connections remind us that even the business
The Free Market 20, no. 6 (June 2002) As oil and gasoline prices begin their annual rite of spring, I am waiting for another rite that occurs among media pundits and some economists—who ought to know better. That particular ritual is the accusation levied against oil companies that they are “manipulating the market” in order to force up prices.
The heat under the “living wage” debate has been turned up a notch. The Public Policy Institute of California has just published an extensive study by Michigan State economist David Neumark, the main conclusion of which is that, despite causing increased unemployment among the lowest-wage workers, “living wage laws raise the wages of low-wage
One of the enduring myths about Washington, D.C., is that the political classes can be--or at least want to be--educated about economic matters. Individuals and foundations have sunk millions of dollars into “think tanks” and seminars, all in hopes of teaching basic concepts of economics to those who are in positions of political leadership. Lest
One of the justifications for socialism and interventionism has been that some commodities simply are “too important to leave to the market.” Thus, the New York Times, certainly no friend to free markets, recently editorialized about California and the Enron affair: It is Washington’s duty to find out why (electricity markets melted down in
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.