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Ah, I see here that today is the anniversary of the beginning of construction on Disneyland in 1954, the carrying out of a vision of a fully private community of fun and fantasy. Its remarkable “small world” turned out to be a microcosm of a trend to the privatization and de-socialization of the entire world and the globalization of Disney’s

Roger Garrison calls our attention to this fascinating post by David Laidler, who is discussing the Austrian theory of the trade cycle. His description seems fairly competent and his account of the times is strikingly interesting. But what in particular draws my attention is his account of why the promising theory of the Austrians never went

U SA Today has a very nice story on the effects of Clinton’s 1990s welfare reform. Contrary to the predictions of disaster, the tougher rules actually ended up being a step in the right direction. The rules made it more costly for those on welfare to stay there forever. “Welfare caseloads nationwide have declined by nearly 58% since the landmark

This is an interesting article that rings true. The dot-com boom was largely about “genius” MBAs coming up with brilliant ideas for online companies, for example. They spent ages in meetings blowing hot air, drawing up financial charts, and coming up with marketing plans. The actual technical implementation was considered so unimportant that they

Having giving a paper at the ASC on Twain at a pro-market writer,I failed to note this interesting passage from Life on the Mississippi, which seems to illustrate the difference between mere information and entrepreneurship: For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in

Alan Sweezy, brother of Marxist Paul Sweezy, reviewed Menger’s Collected Works in 1936, and said that Menger had a great theory until he attempted to universalize it. A very interesting if completely wrongheaded

People who favor having federal goons arrest undocumented workers and send them home imagine that this is a great thing for American culture and society. But of course no government program quite turns out that way you expect it to. In this case, the results have been to create a huge labor shortage in the fruit picking industry. People who only

From the Forbes blog : Good news for those of us who enjoy the occasional (or maybe even frequent) after work cocktail: tipping back a few can help fill your wallet. Drinkers earn 10 to 14% more money at their jobs than nondrinkers - and men who drink socially, visiting a bar at least once a month, bring home an additional 7% in pay, according to

Passages like this one from The Humane Economy by Wilhelm Roepke make me think that the Mises.org store should be carrying this book, despite its failings otherwise. It’s from the 1971 LibertyFund edition, pp. 168-70: Very many people imagine that taxation of the higher income brackets merely implies restriction of luxury spending and that the