Building the world’s tallest building has been a matter of particularly bad timing by entrepreneurs. Even if they were able to successfully steal away enough tenants from the remaining pool of renters, the economic problem for society is that valuable resources are lost in the process of...
Audio Mises Daily
Audio recordings of Mises Daily articles.
A debate has been raging for some time among those in the finance industry about whether the United States is currently experiencing inflation, deflation, stagflation, reflation, hyperinflation, or maybe even some other sort of “-flation” that only Dr. Seuss could imagine. Given the confusion, this...
Republicans used to talk about reducing the welfare state. I remember when candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980 promised to end the Energy and Education departments. Some Republicans, who themselves have caught the entitlement-spending/social-engineering bug, now propose the creation of a federal...
At the outset of the American “experiment,” the tax burden was light. Money was gold and silver. The definition of private property was clear and seemingly immutable, and the right to self-defense was sacrosanct. No standing army existed, and a firm commitment to free trade and a noninterventionist...
Reminiscent of a juvenile accepting a dare to do something stupid, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Christopher Dodd, crowed to reporters the other day that committee members had done what many thought would be impossible: the committee agreed to legislation that would rescue...
Albert Jay Nock wrote, “The only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and...
There will come a day that the world financiers will rush from dollars just as they have recently rushed into dollars, causing even worse chaos in the international financial markets. Without a stable monetary unit, the speculation will continue and worsen. Overreaction is now becoming more...
The cliché “Third Way” has been used to define the so-called compromise between the conventional wisdom of the conservative and liberal firebrands. This nice-sounding compromise refers to the noisy rhetoric we hear not only in the US Congress but also in Britain, Germany, and other nations as well...
Chris Anderson, a well-known business guru in the world of online commerce, imagines a world in which all internet services are free. But he has made an error. The reason some goods are given away for free in some markets has no relation to any hypothetical notion of “marginal costs tending to zero...
Let’s pull this sentence out of the civic pieties of our time and see what’s wrong with it: “We should all volunteer our time in charitable causes and give back to the community in a labor of love.” We can’t argue with the instruction here, or the sentiment behind it. My argument is with the choice...
It seems that we may never rid ourselves of the broken-window fallacy, writes Mark Thornton. This audio Mises Daily is narrated by the author.
The movement towards socialized medicine is strong but widely misunderstood. Many ordinary people see health care as a right and complain that it is too expensive. Some economists also see problems with the existing health care system and propose public-sector alternatives. One serious problem with...
John T. Flynn writes that it is government system that accepts responsibility to make the economic system work at full energy, using the device of state-created purchasing power effected by means of government borrowing and spending, and which organizes the economic life of the people into...
Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had it. Capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price...
No subject is so much discussed today — or so little understood — as inflation. The politicians in Washington talk of it as if it were some horrible visitation from without, over which they had no control — like a flood, a foreign invasion, or a plague. It is something they are always promising to...
While his claim of ideological steadfastness on his “basic political views” may have been correct, Rothbard did change his mind on questions of strategy and alliance, most significantly on the question of “McCarthyism” and the broader anti-Communist movement of the American Right, which he...
It is one thing to be concerned about the possible impact of the sum of many tiny human actions on the climate of the planet on which we find ourselves, for this is entirely consistent with choosing life. It is quite another thing to presume that we are doomed unless, whatever we are doing, we stop...
Something happened in Buffalo, New York, that contradicts the propaganda of those who support "gun control."
