Mises Search

Tyler Cowen provides a nice illustration of the Stockholm Syndrome in this post that points out that social democracy is actually just great after all: “We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing

I was a professional chef with a highly regarded firm that served exotic meats such as elephant, giraffe, snake. Ok, I’m exaggerating a little bit. The account of my experience is here

Now available for immediate download : Karl Marx and the Close of His System, by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. The book is also newly in print . Marx had said that the value of commodities reflect their labor input. The problem is that, well, reality doesn’t seem to reflect that at all. Marx had promised to explain why but he never really got around to

Ah, nothing focuses the mind that a good ol’ fashioned stock market sell-off. Nothing is more likely to cause people to decide that Bush is a really bad president, or inspire pessimism about the future. One might think that a war in Iraq and US equity valuations have politically nothing to do with each other, but when portfolios show declining

So here is a story about the “infrequent inspections, deficient safety requirements, and low hiring standards” of day care operations around the country. We need federal regulations! Or so says the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. Two questions. Why isn’t is obvious that if any industry can be self-regulating, it

It’s one thing for a firm to guard its own secrets, and enforce those rules with internal sanctions. But government regulations on insider trading is criminalizing knowledge as such, insofar as it is not in a press release, an notion which wars against the very idea of entrepreneurship. Such thoughts arise in connection with the news that 13 top

Let’s say that we could generate a graph with happiness in rows and wealth in columns. The curve slops perfectly upward. The more wealth you have, the happier you are; the less wealth, the less happy. The same goes for countries: poor countries are packed with people who are down in the dumps, whereas rich countries are overflowing with joyful

The Free Market 20, no. 1 (January 2002)   In the post-attack world, in which politicians attempt to impose the national security state at home and wage war abroad, a simple point has been obscured: it all started with a multiple hijacking. The theft of the planes was made possible not with grenades or heavy explosives but with box cutters—the

The Free Market 20, no. 7 (July 2002)   As the war on terror drags on, many people calling themselves libertarians have decided that it’s not such a bad thing after all. What, they ask, is the point of government if not to bomb those who would threaten our safety? The trouble is that real life works a little differently from the civics-text ideal

The Free Market 9, no. 5 (May 1991)   Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today’s State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation. Faced with this, people find less costly ways to work, produce, and exchange, even if it means doing so