Visa and MasterCard were slammed yesterday by the announcement of the Fed’s new price controls on swipe fees for merchants using the cards. This regulation is obviously horrible for consumers and producers and issuers – it is just bad all around and represents a backward step in economic progress. No way will small business benefit, contrary to
He was a good friend of Ludwig von Mises’s and also the Mises Insitute, so I hope you can understand this rather unconventional posting. Here is the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass that all of Europe is talking about. Requiem in c-moll Missa pro defuncto Archiepiscopo Sigismondo Michael Haydn (1737 — 1806) Domchor & Domorchester St. Stephan Hans
The New York Times reports that many small restaurants and fast-food chains, desperate to hang on to profitability to some extent while the government conspires to kill it, are trying to introduce wine and beer on their menus as a way of drawing customers in. Seems like a no brainer, right? Well, it’s not easy. You have to get permits, deal with
Most people assume that tougher penalties deter crime, but there is reason to doubt it. Here is a case from before the French Revolution. The copy monopoly in those days concerned fabric patterns. It was in France, prior to the revolution. Some patterns were more popular than others, and to get some additional revenue to the crown’s tax coffers,
Last night’s session at the Austrian Scholars Conference was nothing short of magical. After a full day of presentations on new research, and a fascinating and well-delivered talk by Caroline Baum of Bloomberg , John Papola, maker of the Hayek-Keynes rap, presented his video and then gave a talk about how it was made . All the technical details
We wrote UCLA oral history for permission to continue to host this transcript of interviews with F.A. Hayek, rebuilt for us because the version on their site is ridiculously huge, but sadly they have refused to give us permission to host it, so it must be taken
This time it is Robert Klein and George Reisman writing in Barron ‘s: How many more crises must we endure until we realize the common denominator is the creation of money and credit by the Fed? Wall Street bankers and speculators, who try to game the system and make profits during each boom, are mere bit players in these crises. By fostering the
Jobless claims are up , due to “anomalies” and “unusual events,” claims Bloomberg. Sadly, the real causes are not unusual and not anomalies: the gigantic drag on economic life represent by a billion petty regulations, taxes, trade restrictions, gyrating currency values, and a broke banking
We had some sense that it was time for a new edition of Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit , first published in German in 1912, at the very dawn of the age of central banking. Mises patiently explains the origin of money and hammers out a solution to the circularity of value problem of money, postulating a “regression theorem” to underscore how
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.
