Mises Search

Well, it finally happened in my own community. That stupid Bush-era law that rations pseudoephedrine, the ingredient that makes Mucinex and Sudafed work to unstuff the nose, has finally landed someone in the slammer for 20 years . Tanna Nacole Jarrell is 31 years old and she will likely be in jail for 20 years — essentially wrecking her life. The

Apple’s products seem light years ahead of the competition. By the time the competition starts getting vaguely close to making a product that approximates its excellence and elegance, Apple announces the new thing that is more astonishing than ever, and the whole thing starts again. This came home to me this last week when I once again tried the

So the whole green jobs thing in Spain turns out to be catastrophic , just as Gabriel Calzada of Juan de Mariana predicted . The only thing that strikes me as strange here is the very strange reality that a government seems to be admitting error, if only in secret. In the U.S., the government is always and everywhere

Youth unemployment is terribly high. More than half of kids age 16 to 19 do not engage in any gainful labor, a higher percentage than since World War II. The reason has to do with the combination of recession, the wicked minimum wage, and child labor laws that give kids too late a start in the workforce. One blessed exception is the farm, which

We received the sad news today that Joseph Sobran, always a good friend to libertarianism and the Mises Institute, has died. He was surely one of the great stylists of the 20th century and a wonderfully inventive thinker – a man who loved liberty with his whole heart and worked desperately to explain its principles to others even as he never

I was getting my haircut today, and the barber woman and I were talking about the sorry state of the economy. She said my that she is doing her part to help our economy by refusing to buy Mexican hair products, even though they are cheaper than American ones. She said she would spend as much as $2 more per bottle of shampoo if that’s what it would

Zeroing in on a topic like “intellectual property” offers a chance to clarify fundamental notions in economics generally. You think you understand something like property rights or the nature of competition--you have studied the ideas for years!--and then a challenge comes along that blows everything up. It’s an opportunity. Time to think and

[This is part 2 of my live blog of this book] How strange this “intellectual property” issue is. In normal life, we tend to (or should) credit enterprise and markets for most innovations that surround us. I’m typing on a system here that includes products for several dozens different creative companies, with hardware and software and applications

[This is part 4 of an ongoing live blog of Against Intellectual Monopoly] Drugs patents took it on the chin a few years ago, when major drug companies refused to sell cheap AIDS drugs in Africa. Presuming the drugs work, countless lives might have been saved. But the desire to protect the high price on the patented drug--despite the low marginal

The Vatican document on the world economy , as issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, is very puzzling. It seems to dabble in Austrian business cycle theory, naming credit expansion and loose money as the source of the problem. In recent decades, it was the banks that extended credit, which generated money, which in turn sought a