The post-stimulus macroeconomy is panning out pretty much the way Austrians said it would. Unemployment is still high, and now that the Census workers are fired, jobs are being shed. Home construction is declining. Manufacturing growth is falling. Stocks: don’t make me laugh. Everyone is talking about a double dip, as if that would be a shocking
The NYT this morning runs a headline about dramatic progress against Alzheimer’s due to a sharing of findings. The story is breathless about how scientists and institutions have, astonishingly, put aside their copyrights and patents in order to make progress. And the hope is that this will be a model for the future. The key to the Alzheimer’s
The astute Brian Doherty reviews a new book on the history of right-wing victories, this one by a leftwinger but it tells essentially the same story as the right-wing books: how the movement when from success to success in dismantling the New Deal and big government. Telling the tale again and again doesn’t make it
This arrived in my in box from Olav Dirkmaat : I’m from the Netherlands and the most outrageous press release was made by two Dutch ministers (of Finance and Safety & Justice) which I think belong on the Mises.org blog. 2010 is coming to its end, but it seems that the Netherlands were just in time to compete for the prize of epic fail of the year.
A strange argument emerged overnight that illustrates how little even informed people understand about the market economy and its implications. This time the debate centers on a interesting case of a man in rural Tennessee who did not pay his fire-services fee, so the fire department let his house burn down. Here is the news report . You can see
David Leonhardt speaks as the wise one from on high, assuring readers that opposition to Obamacare is part of the American tradition of individualism and laissez-faire. This is one tradition, he says, while another is centralist and collectivist. It’s true enough, I suppose, just as you can say that society has a long tradition of peaceful people
The Chronicle of Philanthropy makes a passing (and mostly implied) point that libertarians have been making for many decades, namely that the real philanthropy of business creators is not how much in company resources they give to charity but rather the way in which their enterprising commercial activities help society. It is a huge point with
This blogger demonstrates that the penalties are higher for downloading music online than for child abduction, stealing actual CDs, robbing and mugging someone, setting someone’s house on fire, stalking, and even murdering in a 2nd class
The ever-fashionable and reliably unprincipled Richard Posner seizes the moment to write and sell a new book, a work which Caronline Baum enjoys crushing .
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.
