The standard belief is that slavery was about obtaining “cheap labor,“ yet nothing could be further from the truth. Slavery comes with high opportunity costs, which is why American slave owners depended upon several government regulations to subsidize their “peculiar institution.”
Audio Mises Wire
Audio recordings of Mises Wire articles, offering contemporary news and opinion through the lens of Austrian economics and libertarian political economy.
Politicians have long claimed that states are like big families, and that political regimes rule in ways similar to how parents raise their families. This is nonsense.
It is understood that Marx's theories stand entirely upon his Labor Theory of Value. If that theory is discredited, so is the scenario that leads to the inevitable triumph of communism. That fact, however, doesn't stop Marx's disciples from employing other fallacies.
Academic historians and archivists have been captured by the hard left and the DEI industry. Not only will the current trends make them bad historians, but it also makes them intolerant people. Mises knew better.
The common belief regarding state power is that it is always justified and there can be no questioning the state's existence. But is that true? Does state power conform to natural law or is it imposed upon subjected people?
California's 2014 ban on “single-use” plastic bags was supposed to lead to less waste of plastic, which hasn't happened. Now environmentalists are demanding the state ban the same plastic bags mandated by the original legislation. One intervention begets another and another.
The ruling elites of the US are calling for a "return" to "Hamiltonian Statecraft" and to move away from so-called isolationism. However, there has been no time since the end of World War II that the US has been anything but aggressive in its foreign policy.
When our ruling classes speak of “believing in democracy,” they are speaking of a romantic version of a form of governance that, in real life, is quite different than the sanitized version presented in our media.
The Salamanca School is known for important contributions to free-market economics and the Austrian School. The Bolognese jurists also made key contributions.
What Murray Rothbard used to call the "Old Right" stood for liberty, freedom of speech, and a free economy. Most importantly, they stood for peace, all in contrast to the "liberals" of their day and ours.
As AI continues to develop, so does the hysteria that AI will soon take over and relegate us to a dystopian future. We need to realize that, like so many other tools, AI can have good and bad uses, but it cannot control itself.
The US Armed Forces expand their footprints in the Indian Ocean, not to defend this country, but to expand military power. The Diego Garcia base has left a trail of ruined lives for those forced off their land to make room for yet another military base.
What is the source of our rights, natural Law or the state? Unfortunately, too many people who should know better choose the latter. David Gordon makes short work of their internal contradictions.
While the world is abuzz over artificial intelligence (AI), present technologies are limited more than most people want to believe. The situation is ripe for malinvestments.
Keynesians are known for using obscure and jumbled jargon to explain their fallacious ideas. The hope being that, the more confusing the language, the greater the perceived scholarship. Good economics can and should be clearly logically explained.
Despite claims from progressive historians that US slavery was a natural outgrowth of a free market economy, the reality is that slavery would have been much costlier without governments—federal and state—subsidizing it. It is time to set the record straight.
Mainstream economists speak of GDP as though it is the economy itself, however, GDP is not a good measure of economic reality. Instead, it presents a distorted picture of genuine economic activity and leads to mistaken conclusions about the economy.
Yet another discouraging trend in law in the UK, Europe, and the US has been the criminalization of what authorities call “hate speech.” However, much of what passes for such “speech” is innocuous at worst and historically has been protected.
Contrary to myths of “Fed independence,” the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department work closely together to keep monetary inflation going nonstop.
Despite opposition from government at every turn, homeschooling has developed into an industry with astounding resources and high-quality results. Contrast the individual educational tailoring of homeschooling versus the government's version of individual care: the IEP label.
