This was in my RSS feed: Stephen Budiansky does some of the math and finds that, giving how efficient it is to move things by truck and by rail, the energy costs associated with shipping lettuce from California to New York are trivial relative to the energy costs associated with storing that lettuce in a New York refrigerator (my apologies to
Can two people still gain from trade even if one person is a lot better at something than the other person? Consider two people: there’s Stan, who is really, really good at sweeping driveways and mowing lawns. There’s also Bob, an immigrant from the future who doesn’t have driveways or lawns in his time and is worse than Stan at both. In the
Probably. Here’s Ryan McMaken, from the LewRockwell.com Blog : We must have a police state in this country or immigrants will come here and support the creation of a police state. This raises what I think is a very important question. A lot of people oppose the war on drugs because of the horrific consequences or agree that we should abolish the
Robert A. Lawson and I just published our paper “Human Rights and Economic Liberalization” in Business and Politics . The paper can be downloaded here . Here’s the abstract: Using several case studies and data from the Economic Freedom of the World annual report and from the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, we estimate the effect of human rights
I appreciate everyone’s comments on my intro to my “Capitalism and Socialism” course ; indeed, one of the first things we’re going to do is figure out exactly what we mean. Two themes we will explore are the emergence of social order and the restriction of coercion. That’s part of what my Forbes column today is about . Attempts to centrally plan a
I just had an interesting online discussion with John Payne from the Show-Me Institute about light rail. Light rail fails on pretty much every efficiency measure, and I write that as someone who likes being able to get to the places I need to go in St. Louis without having to drive. It just so happened that the MetroLink in St. Louis was
Leonard Read’s classic “I, Pencil” is a staple of introductory economics classes the world over. I expect that the same will happen with the TED talk below, in which Thomas Thwaites details how he tried to make a toaster completely from scratch. He makes a valiant effort. At the end, he is able to get something he can plug in that ran for about
The Free Market 26, no. 7 (July/August 2008) 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
The Free Market 23, no. 12 (December 2003) It is not a short step from poverty to prosperity, and the transition itself has long been exploited by opponents of the market economy. Even today, the myth survives that the Industrial Revolution was characterized by worsening living standards, when it in fact marked a new age of mass prosperity, a
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.
