Most cartels and trusts would never have been set up had not the governments created the necessary conditions by protectionist measures. Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency immanent in capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laisser-faire. —Ludwig von
Last week’s decision by the Federal Reserve to pause on interest rates left many unanswered questions, despite reporters raising them during the Q & A session . While the average person may be skeptical that the Fed can control inflation by simply raising interest rates, it’s still a position the Fed holds onto dearly. The problem is that Chair
Most people agree that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some would even argue that we are closer now than we were in those fateful days, when Soviet missiles in Cuba almost triggered a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. In those days we were told that we were in a life-or-death struggle with
The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday left the target policy interest rate (the federal funds rate) unchanged at 5.25 percent. This “pause” in the target rate suggests the FOMC believes it has raised the target rate high enough to rein in price inflation which has run well above the Fed’s arbitrary two-percent
Last week, I discussed the way in which Patrick Deneen misreads John Stuart Mill in his book Regime Change . I’d like to continue the assault on Regime Change this week by looking at an argument he makes against libertarianism. Libertarians, Deneen alleges, are elitists. They think that ordinary people need to be ruled by an elite class of
For the past ten weeks, American conservatives have been boycotting Bud Light in response to a beer can featuring transgender figure Dylan Mulvaney. Since then, sales of the beer have been plummeting . However, this week, a new benchmark has been passed: Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light is no longer the top-selling beer in the United States.
One hears this kind of thing from modern monetary theory (MMT) advocates whenever their economic theories are attacked: “We say not spending constrained,” they grumble, “We don’t mean ‘now spend’.” However, what politicians hear is that they can have anything they really want because they can just print the money for it. “It’s a fact,” an MMTer
President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointees have an affinity for returning to an earlier era’s antitrust enforcement, sometimes summarized as a “big is bad” or “neo-Brandeisian” approach. The most famous (or notorious) current example is the FTC’s opposition to the proposed merger between Microsoft and Activision. In their
Not many are aware that one of the greatest works against the encroachment of the state originates from a German thinker. As early as the late eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) raised the question of the general limits of state activity. Humboldt wrote his Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the
Just over a week ago, America’s national debt surpassed $32 trillion. As of Friday this week, it climbed to $32.1 trillion , and the prospects for reducing the debt appear to be nonexistent. This is primarily due to the continuous raising of the debt ceiling and the role played by the Federal Reserve in the money creation process. According to Fox
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.