You are uptown in a shopping district of a small community, and you pass by the meat shop, the wine shop, the coffee shop, two churches side by side, a coin shop, an antique store and hold it right there. A coin shop? This is irresistible, because, as implausible as this may sound, all political truth can be found in a coin shop. And not just
Barack Obama’s tax advisers recently posted a piece in the Wall Street Journal about their candidate’s tax plans. Their article was designed to triangulate, painting their candidate as a tax cutter and the Republican opposition as a secret tax raiser. It was well written and well argued — not that you can really trust anything you read about what
These are times when you just feel like yelling at the people who write the news, particular the business press. They are happy to report, word for word, what the Fed and Treasury Department, and their message is always the same: hey, it’s not our fault; in fact, we are fixing the problem! We are told that the economy has tanked because foreigners
David Henderson, writing for the Cato Institute , says that Greenspan ran a “tight” monetary policy. So of course he can’t be blamed. Robert Murphy has already responded to this claim in a wonderful article . Some additional thoughts. First: Second: But Henderson says that these are not relevant data. We should instead look at year-on-year change.
Marketwatch quotes Bernanke on a new benchmark: “We will not let prices fall at 10% a year.” Good thing he hasn’t been running the computer industry for the last 15 years.
Bernanke is said to support stimulus (NYT): “If Mr. Bernanke opposed Congressional action on the ground that spending increases and tax cuts would increase the budget deficit, the Fed might restrain its own effort to stimulate the economy with lower interest rates. Mr. Bernanke wants to keep the Fed out of political jockeying, but he is also wary
Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Advisors, offers in the WSJ an Austrian-sounding explanation of why (though I’m not sure of this “natural-rate = nominal GDP growth” stuff): Despite record passenger traffic, airlines are bleeding cash and going bankrupt. Food riots have cropped up around the world, Canada is paying farmers to kill
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.