This month in 1979 Sony introduced the first Walkman (initially called the Soundabout), a small portable cassette-tape player designed to be used with headphones. It was priced at $199.95. In today’s dollars that’s $540. Today, of course, you will spend considerably less for a product that is considerably better. A Sony CD Walkman at Best Buy
This paper by Randy Barnett has garnered a number of links out there in blogland. The title is “The Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism.” My hunch was that this was probably a paper with a predictable subtext condemning Rothbard as too doctrinaire etc.—the subject of innumerable mini-treatises in libertarian newsletters over the years—and
In the “policy world”--the sector of society where most ideas are bad, dated, or both--the discussion centers on ways to go about ‘privatizing’ social security via individual accounts. The WSJ sought out a “liberal” and a “conservative” economist (will we ever get rid of these terms?) to debate the issue. But instead, what they found was that the
The Washington Times today covers the emerging blue-state secession movement. It started as a joke but seems to be working its way towards becoming a real proposal . Meanwhile, journalists are discovering strange new artifacts from American history: “While secession is often thought to be a Southern phenomenon, Northern leaders repeatedly
Jack Crooks in the Asia Times argues that the Fed’s interest rate movie could mean a big setback for China’s economic growth. Quoting Mises on the trouble with Credit expansion, he also offers this little chart to account for how US interest rate policy has beeen indirectly responsible for the artifical
If bar codes gave you the creeps, and you imagined a world in which the government stamps us all on the forehead, don’t read this article from the NYT . It seems the FDA is just crazy for a new technology called “radio-frequency identification.” The idea is to track products using tiny antennas in order to prevent fraud and conterfeiting. And if
Reagan liked to quote Mises (but I can’t seem to find the one attributed to Mises in his works: “A nation is the more prosperous today the less it has tried to put obstacles in the way of the spirit of free enterprise and private
“I also prefer the Austrian school of economics — which includes thinkers such as von Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard — not least because it does not overemphasize the textbook model of perfect competition, especially by using that model as a stick with which to beat real-world industries. For the Austrians, the essence of economic life is not
From Antiwar.com comes a link to this fascinating story from the Asia Times : “Although many countries do not trade the Iraqi currency, Western traders have been doing so through websites. When trading began last October, a dollar bought 420. Now it buys 555 — a 32% drop. The currency has declined 11% against the dollar in the past five weeks
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.
