Mises Search

Here’s a great video from Reason.tv on “The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn’t Happen.” I have asked, seriously, why people still pay attention to hysterical scare-mongers like Paul Ehrlich. I’ve been told it’s because they “raised awareness” of environmental issues, but after reading The Population Bomb and other screeds–and I use that

Richard Sandor spoke at Rhodes yesterday, and his lecture raised a number of points we have talked about this semester in my econ 100 class. For readers interested in studying environmental issues further and/or pursuing law as a career, here are a few things to read: Ronald Coase, “ The Problem of Social Cost .” This is one of the most

Earlier this evening, I attended a seminar on Austrian economics with Peter Boettke sponsored by Fundacion Bases in Argentina. In addition to just wanting to participate, I wanted to see what it was like to be a member of the audience for something like this as it’s a lot like what I expect my Mises Academy course to be like. It was really

Matt Zwolinski and some of the commentators on the new Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog take issue with the way I presented a libertarian approach to compassionate economic policy in this article . This is the kind of life that the blogosphere brings to the Great Conversation, and I’m glad Matt and his commenters picked up (and responded to) my

The Institute for Humane Studies is putting together (and beta-testing) a series of short videos on basic principles of economics and the classical liberal tradition; they’re available at LearnLiberty.org . Here the first of my three “Trade is Made of Win” videos, which you might find useful if you’re teaching comparative advantage. In it, I

Paul Krugman’s “ Ricardo’s Difficult Idea ” is still one of my favorite pieces of pop economics. In this light, I was very disappointed to see him referring to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine in a discussion of the ongoing power struggle in Wisconsin (HT: Charles McKinney ). While The Shock Doctrine tells a lot of gripping and tragic stories

This paper by Thomas C. Leonard is making the rounds on Facebook (HT to Steve Horwitz, who started this fire); I don’t know how I missed it when it was published in 2005. It is making me revise my understanding of the debate over minimum wages, for example. I have always thought that it’s a question of understanding economics versus not

From MoveOn.org , courtesy of some friends in my Facebook network: “Congress must protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling.” I write this as a frequent user of PBS content: with two kids in diapers, Sesame Street , Sid the Science Kid , Super WHY! , and other PBS programs are big parts of our

In the comments on an earlier post, my good friend and former neighbor Stephen Haptonstahl took issue with my claim that NPR and PBS redistribute wealth upward . Scroll down a bit; he points out that “[t]he median NPR listener makes $86K. The median tax dollar comes from someone who made over $150K.” It’s a fair point, but I’m pretty sure that the

I went through airport security in Memphis a few hours ago. This is the first time I’ve flown in a few months. I opted out of the backscatter imaging machine and into the full-body “pat”down. I put “pat” in quotes because this wasn’t a patdown. It was an extremely thorough rubdown. An observation and a question: 1. I can see how this experience