Mises Search

One of the things that first attracted me to economics is that its logic leads us sometimes to counterintuitive conclusions. A perfect example of this is the regulated workplace. The minimum wage raises incomes for some workers and lowers incomes for others. Workplace safety regulations advantage those who are very risk averse at the expense of

As 2008 draws to a close, we do well to reflect on the lessons we have learned. A new president has been elected and will be inaugurated in a few short weeks. The outgoing president claims that he must abandon free-market principles in order to save the free market. Somehow, this has translated itself into a multibillion-dollar bailout for

  I saw my first Tesla Roadster a few weeks ago; I passed it in Los Angeles on my way to the airport. I have heard interesting things about Tesla as an innovative company: they have broken new ground on the production of cars that don’t run on gasoline and that don’t produce noxious emissions. The first-generation Tesla Roadsters are shockingly

  Unfortunately, the great libertarian polemics of the middle of the 20th century are taking on a newfound relevance as we trudge along the road to serfdom. Fortunately, the most important ideas in the classical-liberal tradition are crystallized in these works. One such work is Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 book The Anticapitalistic Mentality . He

  History provides ample evidence that ideas matter, and reverence for facts is an intellectual virtue. History also shows that one of the more pernicious phenomena in the world is a set of facts that simply aren’t true. Western industrial history, and the policies building on it are marred by a broad collection of false “facts” that have proven

  Should we be conscripting people into the military or community service programs of some sort? Whether the government should require “national service” is a perennial issue that has enjoyed renewed emphasis during this time of economic strife, but let’s not mince words. What is compulsory national service but a type of slavery? We can sing the

  Recently, the Shelby County Commission passed an ordinance that would make it illegal for employers and firms that contract with the county to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. Unfortunately, the discussion got bogged down in questions about whether homosexuality is or is not moral. It was assumed that the government can

  With much fanfare, the company formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken — now just “KFC” — has introduced a new line of grilled-chicken products. To the consternation of some local commentators, Fowler Foods (the company that owns the KFC restaurants in Memphis) has decided not to offer grilled chicken because the special grills they would need

Economists, political scientists, students, and laymen unfamiliar with the Austrian tradition sometimes restrict their discussion of Ludwig von Mises’s contributions to economic science to his magnum opus, Human Action , and usually only then sometimes to deride it as a massive, irrelevant tome that nobody actually reads. Those who are familiar

I was the teaching assistant for a course on the theory of property rights during the fall semester of 2002. We spent quite a bit of time discussing rent control, various rent-control cases, and the legal principles that informed judicial decisions surrounding rent-control cases. One of these principles was an aversion to “windfall” profits.