News items on the House vote on the 2005 budget--$2.41 trillion--have pointed to the party-line voting pattern, reinforcing the Ekelund-Thornton point about the GOP. Yet the rollcall shows 10 dissenting Republicans who voted against the budget, with at least one ( Ron Paul ) voting against it for the right reasons. (Paul even returned unused funds
Detroit News : “Economist Keeps Vested Interests Honest”: “Detroit got a little safer for the vested interests on Monday. That’s the day David Littmann, Comerica’s irrepressible economist, retired after nearly 35 years. His official job was to advise his bank about future economic trends, but sometimes it seemed his real job was speaking the truth
We all know people who for years have been taking the buns off burgers, but now we have the commercial response to low-carb mania to remind us how closely this highly competitive industry watches consumer eating patterns: “ Making Low-Carb Concessions, Restaurants Respond To Popular Diet Trend .” It seems like a trend a central planner would be
In foreign policy , if not yet in economic affairs: “We keep repeating the same mistakes. The story behind last week’s uprising by followers of Moktada al-Sadr bears a striking resemblance to the story of the wave of looting a year ago, after Baghdad fell.... Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam’s sons were
The CSciMon runs an inadvertantly hilarious article on what happens to an anti-business business that becomes a consortium and eventually a big business with high fees for fair-trade certification . By adhering to dated ILO standards with a green twist , the simpliest points seemed to have escaped these people. What if, for example, a coffee
A man “who believed the solution to every human problem was death.” Simon Sebag Montefiore’s new biography of Stalin, reviewed by R. Pipes in the NYT .
It is rare that public intellectuals are held to account for their past positions relative to “adjustments” made later in light of events. So it is particularly satisfying to read Marcus Epstein’s devastating chronicle of National Review’s unacknowledged flip-flop on the Iraq War—a chronicle made necessary because NR itself has so far not admitted
Correspondent Jason , who reads this blog, writes to ask about Austrian opinion on the issue of local currency. “The websites here and here contain detailed analyses and agendas towards ending the government’s monopoly over printed money, and instead argue for local or regional money backed directly by goods and labor.” My first thought was that
David Brooks’s review of Chernow’s hagiographic biography of Hamilton makes a number of implausible claims, above all the following characterization of the GOP: “Today our liberal/conservative debates tend to pit the advocates of government against the advocates of the market. Today our politics is dominated by rival strands of populism: the
From Forbes.com : Venzuelan Finance Minister Tobias Nobrega is trying to cut the cord between his country and the International Monetary Fund (much to the chagrin of the latter). CARACAS, Venezuela, April 25 (Reuters) - Venezuela was recovering from an economic recession without the help of the International Monetary Fund, its finance minister
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.
