Federal Deficit Surpasses $200 Billion for First Seven Months (AP): “The government ran up a deficit of $201.6 billion in the first seven months of the 2003 budget year, more than three times the total for the corresponding period a year earlier... Federal spending for the seven months totaled $1.26 trillion, a 6.5 percent increase from the
Just arrived in the library: Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics by Alejandro A. Chafuen . This is the most accessible treatment of pre-Smith economic thought, showing not only that economic science predates the 18th century but proving that the late scholastics were very sophisticated pre-Austrians on economics, and
What is the best means for distater planning: government or market? As this story says , and many local reports confirm, Meijer grocery stores in the Midwest stayed open during the power failure, providing gas, water, batteries, and all the rest, while keeping all cash registers open for 24 hours and serving all comers. They did this by use of
It took a few days, but the view is already deeply entrenched: The Blackout Was a Market Failure (BBC). The article by Stephen Evans fails to point out few industries are so heavily regulated and monopolized as electric utilities ( Krugman at least hinted at that ). And he ends with a spin on Adam Smith: “The invisible hand of the market often
It seems that Mises.org’s reprinting of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in Cartoons has led to a controversy at Keenspot . One blogger says: “You’re looking at 1940s era GOP big business propaganda that tries to convince people that voting Democrat will destroy the country.” Another says: “It seems to pretty much parallel what’s happening in the US
From Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe) comes this review of the new ISI book The Literary Book of Economics . “Watts, a Purdue economist, had the ingenious notion of representing economic principles with selections drawn from literature, poetry, and drama. The result is a wonderfully rich and vivid survey of the economic realm — a compilation far more
California and other states restrict the ability of wineries to sell to individual consumers, and wineries object. Conservatives are split over what to do about it , reports the New York Times . Kenneth Starr and Clint Bolick want the federal government to overrule state laws using the commerce clause and the Supreme Court. Robert Bork and C.
Blumen is right about Epstein’s good column in Barron’s. Here is most of it: Think back to The Godfather — the book, not the movie. It describes a Mafia chief who owns a firm that does highway repair in the New York City area. But the gangster also owns a fleet of freight-hauling trucks that ruin the highways with their heavy overload (his
Concerning the new Cato Policy Report and its essay “ How FDR Prolonged the Great Depression ,” Jim Powell has much to say about M. Friedman but never mentions Rothbard’s great 1963 treatise America’s Great Depression . Ron Neff of The Last Ditch comments: In the lead article of the current CATO POLICY REPORT (July/August 2003; Vol. XXV, No. 4),
Paul Kasriel of Northern Trust argues that Greenspan has the second best record on inflation of any postwar Fed governor, not because he intended it but because he benefited from a number of outside trends that have kept price inflation low. Kasriel predicts, however, that: “Greenspan is more likely to leave his successor a hand similar to that
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.
