Mises Search

What if they don’t want a government? Must one be imposed? These are my questions to news reports that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made a surprise trip to Baghdad in a desperate effort to jumpstart stalled efforts to form an Iraqi government. The lack of a governing coalition in Iraq was simply

Ludwig von Mises argued that ballots are to be preferred to bullets because while they bring about similar outcomes, the former has less bloodshed than the latter. Murray Rothbard (Mises’s student) criticized this conclusion (which Mises shared, after all, with David Hume), because, he argued, democratic rule promotes political arrangements — not

So I am getting a ride home from daily Mass, and my friend and driver, a history professor at my school, is angry at British Petroleum’s latest announcement that a major oil field is being shutdown. This was news to me because I hadn’t checked any of the news sites that day, although I must admit that following Mass, such events are furthest from

We are sitting around a dinner table following a mammoth St. Martin’s Day feast—myself and three other professors, and our wives, and my ten-year-old who never liked the kids’ table anyway—when one professor is asked about his upcoming conference trip to Oxford. The conference topic is diversity. So in the interest of small talk, and of genuine

There seems to be two popular paths to wealth in the private sector today. The first is tried and true method: you try to anticipate consumers’ needs, and then risk your capital trying to satisfy them. Successful entrepreneurs anticipate and satisfy correctly, while the unsuccessful ones don’t. The second is more nefarious. With this method, you

This is not your father’s housing market, nor your grandfather’s, for that matter. For them, steadily rising — but basically stable — home values seemed (more or less) a given. Recent news suggests that that situation may be a thing of the past. The National Association of Realtors estimated optimistically (have you ever known a pessimistic

I live in Alabama, and my state’s economic development agency is perhaps among the most active in the country. It is now certainly among the best funded, as voters here recently approved a referendum increasing a cap on the oil and gas royalties that fund its activities to $750 million. It will use this money (ostensibly) to generate jobs, retain

Due to credible competition that has emerged among this year’s candidates for the Hubris in Monetary Policy Award, the Award Committee has announced that it is officially deadlocked. The competition is centered on two candidates. Take, for instance, the submission by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who provided remarkable testimony to the

At the time I write this, the United Autoworkers Union just ended a seven-hour strike against Chrysler — thus ending the walking off of jobs by workers and the restriction by threat of violence of those who would have tried to take their place. Those are, after all, the two characteristics of a strike. You don’t work, and you physically threaten

So it has come to this. Years of spending, inflating, taxing, and redistributing has left the US economy teetering on a recession that our best and brightest — meaning the ones who created this mess — claim requires a multibillion-dollar economic-relief package to quell fears, promote confidence, and spur recovery. And, one might add, to keep