Mises Search

From the Wall Street Journal ($): Some of the devils in the details: Capital Gains : “For lower-income taxpayers, lawmakers cut the 10% capital-gains rate to 5% and eventually zero in 2008. The new plan doesn’t make any changes in the basic rules for deducting capital losses -- a subject many readers have complained about in recent years. Child

James Grant: “ The Money Printers” (Forbes ): “Inflation, as defined by the great Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), is an unwarranted rise in the money supply—more exactly, a rise in the supply of money not offset by a rise in the demand for money. Rising prices are a symptom of inflation, not the thing itself. Thinking as

New York Times : “In the most palpable of ways, the American promise of a new Iraq is floundering on the inability of the American occupiers to provide basic services, particularly electricity, in Baghdad, a city with five million residents, about the size of metropolitan Houston, and the country’s economic heart. On the priority list of places

New York Time’s critic Jackson’s portrait on the new $20 bill : “The overgrown, right eyebrow has morphed into a giant albino caterpillar crawling to the edge of Jackson’s face. He seems to have acquired a double chin. And his tight-lipped glower has been replaced by a near smile. The glance is ambiguous. One eye seems to be staring almost ahead;

From the Globe and Mail : “Japan’s biggest four banks reported massive losses for the just-ended financial year Monday as the plunging value of the stocks they own hammered their earnings.... Japan’s megabanks have been saddled with mounting bad debts as they continue to lend to money-losing borrowers and get hit with new sour loans as quickly as

David Warsh’s EconomicPrincipals.com this week discusses the change in the intellectual climate from the mid-1970s to today, in the context of three movements that rose up to challenge the social-democratic consensus, among which were the “’classical liberals’ or libertarians, exemplified by Ludwig von Mises, Friederich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton

Economy, Not Iraq, on America’s Mind (Newsday.com ): “For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the American people are more concerned about the nation’s economic woes than about terrorism, war or Iraq, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. About 65 percent of Americans approve of Bush overall, but his ratings on the

From the Village Voice comes proof that lefties have a role to play in stopping Republican-style socialism: “The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry to make high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), which—theoretically—can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by

Deflation hysteria spreads to Eurozone  (BBC)     Inflation, not deflation, is the real danger  (Fin Times)     Durable goods orders fall  (Reuters)     Gold may top $400  (Bloomberg): “The economy is a mess,’’ said Joseph Foster, who manages the $200 million Van Eck International Gold Fund. “We are under deflationary pressure. The Fed cut

Does poverty create terrorists? If the answer rests with statistical correlations, one’s perspective has much to do with how the data are manipulated. Alan Krueger offers this corrective to the prevailing view  (NYT) “Once a country’s degree of civil liberties is taken into account--measured by Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes