Mises Search

To borrow from Martha Stewart, if you support the Mises Institute , it’s a good thing. I first became involved with the Mises Institute in 2001, when, on a lark, I decided to attend the Austrian Scholars Conference. I was an economics major; I was an active libertarian; I enjoyed going to conferences, and I knew I would be going to graduate school

In the wake of the recent flooding in Iowa, the state’s attorney general has announced that Iowa’s rules against price gouging are now in effect. These rules prohibit businesses from “substantially raising the prices for needed goods or services without justification” in the wake of a natural disaster. According to a June 23 press release from the

While preparing to lead a discussion of the merits of trade with first-year students last fall, I came across a depressing headline in the Wall Street Journal . At the time, the Republicans were expressing skepticism about free trade. As a signatory to a petition to protest Hoover-era trade policies (like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff), I was dismayed.

The oil industry is everybody’s favorite whipping boy, and indeed it is tempting to criticize them for their acceptance of past government largesse. However, the lion’s share of criticism of the oil companies consists not of criticism of their violations of libertarian principles but of their status as exemplars of the alleged excesses of free

In his classic Economics in One Lesson , Henry Hazlitt applies Frederic Bastiat’s “broken window” fallacy. Many still haven’t learned the lesson, apparently: this article from the Boston Globe argues that this year’s earthquakes in China will be good for Chinese economic growth and that disasters can be good for the economy more generally.

  A quick scan of any newspaper suggests that high fuel prices have disrupted our daily affairs. While politicians and pundits across the political spectrum are fretting about the need for a national energy policy, wringing their hands about the apparent un-American-ness of our dependence on foreign oil, and worrying that the massive run-up in gas

I have received a lot of interesting and useful comments on my recent article about local foods , and I would like to take this opportunity to clarify a few things and continue the conversation. If locally grown produce tastes better, and if one prefers to know where one’s food is produced, then eating locally is a great idea. If one’s goal is to

A Tyson Chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee has agreed to grant its workers a day off for the Muslim holiday Eid el-Fitr, replacing Labor Day at the request of the union that represents approximately 1200 plant employees, among them approximately seven hundred Somali Muslim immigrants. Predictably, the decision has created a firestorm of

Where does morality leave off and social science pick up? This is not to give the short shrift to issues of morality, but it recognizes that many social issues are far more complicated than they first appear to be; and before we make policies, we have to make sure that we have considered the likely unintended consequences of the policies we

[As surely as summer follows spring, natural disasters are followed by saber rattling about “price gouging,” which is usually defined very lucidly and clearly as an “unconscionable” increase in the price of a necessity. These tend to follow a formula, so I thought that instead of writing a new article discussing the unintended consequences of