A fascinating and all-too-brief perspective on the economics of rebates, from Robert Frasca at Division of Labour : tax avoidance as the real reason for this largely annoying institution: Rebates turn customers into creditors. If it is cheaper to borrow from customers than from financial markets, then it is efficient for the company to offer
The Gringrich generation of Republicans wasn’t all it was cracked up to be when elected, but thanks to this New York Times analysis we know even more: the remaining members have become the source of the problem, having gone from cutters to big spenders. Compare the results of political markets with those of free enterprise: what would happen to a
They could have cut to the chase years ago and admitted what Bush said yesterday : they are going to try to extract more money from the population via higher taxes to fund the transition (from a pure transfer program to an actual forced savings program). (Thanks LRC .) Coda: More detail from the New York Times , and it’s even worse (it’s always
And thus does the deficit soar to $427 billion . Whenever news stories dig up Fed officials, politicians, or bureaucrats who express grave concern about the deficit trend, we might imagine a group of thieves with a back up printing press worry about their spending habits. So long as they get away with it and believe they can evade the
So this is how the New York Times greets Thomas Woods’s book , which, far from being “conservative” in the sense of the Bush adminstration, celebrates old-style liberalism, as in laissez-faire, anti-war, pro-trade, anti-authoritarian state, pro-revisionist history, anti-corporatist, anti-coercion, pro-voluntarism, pro-decentralism. This completely
How nice to see Russell Robert’s The Invisible Heart getting some attention . It’s a wonderful novel about a high-school economics teacher and his attempt to explain to others close to him why economics matters and what it teaches us about the world. Roberts presents the economist as an idealist who chooses his vocation over other considerations
At last, journalists are looking into Chile’s system of “privatization.” This NYT piece points out an important difference with the US case: “Chile was careful before it started its private system to accumulate several years of budget surpluses, in contrast to the recent large deficits in the United States.” Even so, “the transition period has
Harold Ford of Tenn., via Talking Points and B rad DeLong , points the way to a likely consensus on Social Security reform (politics being the art of a compromise to tax you more, and all that): in exchange for private accounts, the cap on FICA taxes will be lifted, so that the 20% of the population that earns more then $87,000 has to pay the
A very insightful and fresh look at the Iraqi elections by Sudha Shenoy blogging at Liberty and Power. “Once again, ordinary people are the helpless meat in the sandwich between contenders for
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.