Dallas Fed President Bob McTeer, it seems, often breaks from promoting easy money policies in order to write poetry . Here is an excerpt: It would also be swell To be a member of the Committee on Personnel. A master of the universe I wanted to be That was important to me. But I’ve lowered my sights somewhat Since I’ve aged, and gone to pot.
From the great Spanish scholastic Juan de Mariana, writing in the late 15th century: “It is not rare for the iniquitous and equally useless suggestion of altering the value of money to be whispered in the king’s ear. With this measure, they say, no one will suffer direct harm. The intrinsic value of money will be lower, but the legal value will
Many thoughtful readers, responding to my Mises.org article “Mad Socialism Disease” , have pointed out that there is not much good science out there that supports the belief that anyone has died in Brtain due to Mad Cow, and that the widely held belief that this is the case is based on bad science and bad journalism. Writes Tony Baxendale: I am
The US Agriculture Department’s boorish manipulation of the mad cow scare last December is coming back to haunt it. Several reports are out today indicating that the single confirmed case of BSE at that farm in Washington State was not sick after all. Newsday reports that “[c]ontrary to the department’s account, three eyewitnesses at the
...Call your office. A reader wrote this morning in response to my Martha Stewart article on Mises.org: “[I]t is one matter to profess innocence when questioned by the media, it is quite another animal when someone intentionally sets out to deceive the public by voluntarily proclaiming their [sic] innocence in order to prop up their [sic]
A new series on the Traffic Security Administration, running in the Seattle Times , reminds us of something that is obvious to anyone who has flown after 9/11: centralized government property protection is always a bad idea. An excerpt: Four months ago, at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, a conveyor belt jammed at 9 a.m. For 90 minutes,
For kicks, and to make sure that I don’t just buy libertarian “indoctrination” without listening to the opposition, I’m on the Heritage Foundation e-mail list. Today, I received an entertaining article on the PolicyWire. Marriage Amendment Protects Federalism by Edwin Meese III. The sad thing is, it’s not intended to be entertaining. But, when
If you follow financial news related to Fed policy, you would have noticed a recent push for the use of “a new monetary tool,” called countercyclical capital buffers. Some prominent Fed officials and Fed watchers — the monetary version of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men — have decided the time is now to start raising such
On a recent jaunt to the end of the world, I found myself in one of those situations awkward for an Austrian economist, which is that of defending the Chicago school and Milton Friedman. As a result of my discussions with Chileans regarding economics and politics—especially the persisting divide in Chile between Allende and Pinochet supporters—I
A new book argues that not only was the doomed investment firm way overexposed to risky assets and beleaguered by bad management, but it also made the wrong choice when it was requested to help out LTCM ten years earlier. From a review : Bear had been the only big firm that refused to help out Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that came
What is the Mises Institute?
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.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
