I received the following in an email from a reader in response to my Mises Daily article for today: I grew up in East Germany - a similar economic environment as there was in the former Soviet Union. For (equally) poor East Germans, buying a new dryer would have been utterly impossible. Firstly, central planing never allocated enough resources to
[Editor’s Note: The debate over the effects of the Affordable Care Act on incentives to work continues. In this selection from Chapter 11 of Man vs. The Welfare State (1969), Henry Hazlitt discusses some impacts of welfare programs on incentives.] by Henry Hazlitt I should like to return here to the question of incentives. I have already
You’d think that after 10-plus years of economic recession, despite having forced interest rates down to near-zero levels in their never-ending quest to pump new money into the economy, the central banking Samurai at the Bank of Japan would show the good sense to admit defeat and fall on their swords. Instead, writes Martin Fackler in the Globe
“A big part of the decline in wholesale prices came from retreating energy prices, which had been stoked in previous months by war tensions,” reports the Kansas City Star. With the specter of falling energy prices hovering over the economy, thank goodness that Asia’s central banker is on the job.
Alabama’s Superintendent of Education Ed Richardson threatened Friday to close Alabama’s 1,400 public schools on Oct. 1 if voters reject Gov. Bob Riley’s record-high tax plan and legislators fail to adopt an education budget, reports today’s Birmingham News . Richardson met with the state’s 128 public school superintendents, who were buzzing after
Today is the 70th anniversary of the creation of the National Recovery Act, Glass-Steagall, and several other New Deal laws that helped make the 1930s the “happy days” that they were. (They were actually American attempts to imitate European fascism.) The New York Times is offering copies of its June 16, 1933, issue for sale, and you can read
Clear, careful communications with the investing public is the Fed’s “new Big Gun” in the battle to manage the American economy, writes Peter Gosselin in the Los Angeles Times (free registration required). Nonetheless, a growing number of economists have begun expressing doubts about the Fed’s latest moves, especially its unexpected focus on the
From Reuters : With yields on U.S. deposits already below the rate of inflation, gold would remain a solid alternative to the dollar whether the Federal Reserve merely pared interest rates this week or slashed aggressively to prevent an overall decline in prices, analysts said. “The more aggressive cut, I would think, gold would react more
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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.
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