Mises Search

Harold Meyerson, writing in the Washington Post , calls for a new New Deal. The old one worked just fine, and current times call for some of the same medicine. Harold says it , and he’s not alone. FDR’s nanny-like visage has been showing up on left-liberal and neocon publications — web and print — by folks who don’t understand that their favorite

Richard Grasso, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange, is in the news again. Back in 2003, he was the pariah du jour , the newest emblem of corporate greed for the new decade. I wrote about him here . At the time, I defended his right to be paid the $188 million promised to him by his former employer. The sum was based on years of

The job fell to me, as it does at times, to do a radio interview. And the topic was — what else? — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the state of the banking system in the United States. While preparing for this interview, I felt an unusual sense of foreboding. Why was this, I wondered? My usual attitude going into such exchanges is one of optimism,

Reading the news and scratching my head. That’s what I have been doing as reports about Georgia, Russia, and South Ossetia populate the Internet. As usual, there are a myriad of economic lessons underlying the event that can be found beneath the official interpretations offered by the principals and their functionaries in the media. But first, let

When the bailout passed last week, no one was surprised. In fact, what looked like a principled opposition to massive legal theft on Monday was transformed into a done backroom deal by Friday once the bill ballooned from three to 400-plus pages, filled with crumbs that congressmen could throw to their districts. It may be that, 25 years from now,

The recent news that Regions Bank scored the worst of the nation’s 19 largest banks on the federal government’s stress tests reflected its bad loan decisions made during the economic boom. Regions’ subsequent acceptance of TARP money, whether done willingly or not, meant that taxpayers would be involuntarily assuming that troubled bank’s risk when

The thrilling crash landing last January of US Airways Flight 1549 into the frigid waters of the Hudson River in New York captivated the mind. Truly, if Hollywood depicted this event, we would require our willing suspension of disbelief, knowing that such an outcome of a doomed plane could never happen that way in real life. Yet it did. Finding

[This talk was delivered at the Berry College Omicron Delta Epsilon installation dinner in Rome, Georgia, on April 2, 2009.]   Studying economics over the last year or so is like an astronomer studying meteors during a dangerous meteor shower. You see dangers out there with some hits and many near misses, you understand them and see their

Is the Great Recession about to end? This has been the dominant meme at least since June, when my local paper, the Anniston Star, ran a front page story by McClatchy’s Kevin Hall with the headline, “Economists: Recession Nearing End as Unemployment Dips.” Sad to say, though, that if such news is the basis for optimism, in June or today, then we

The 1940s seemed like the worst of times. You might not know this, based on documentaries, or at least the kind of documentaries favored by cable history or public-broadcast channels, which depict that decade’s world war as a difficult but glorious triumph of American will over tyranny. In such venues, despots were stopped; countries were