A note from Jesus Huerta de Soto: In the cradle of modern democracy, in the parliament of the United Kingdom, a bill was officially presented in London yesterday with a dual objective: first, to fully and effectively defend citizens’ right of ownership over money they have deposited in checking accounts at banks; and second, to once and for all
WSJ The U.S. housing market continued to deteriorate in the third quarter as even the most credit-worthy borrowers increasingly fell behind on their mortgages, highlighting the problems policy makers have faced in trying to address the problem. A new report from the Office of Thrift Supervision and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found
The theory goes that the SEC slammed Goldman hard in order to push the case of R. Allen Stanford – who ran a $7 billion Ponzi scheme – out of the headlines. The SEC delayed investigating Stanford for 13
A worry one variously hears about getting rid of the idea of intellectual property is that in such a world most of the world will consist entirely in copies of the really successful thing and therefore there would be no real reward for doing something amazing. All incentive to innovate is lost. I’ve never really understood this line of thinking
In 2008, the Mises Institute printed a shirt with the words “Stabilization Is Chaos..” Yes, it’s pretty obscure but the point is that government attempts to stop market functioning in a downturn — deleveraging, bankruptcy, asset re-pricing, labor shifts — will eventually lead to more and more confusion and misallocation than we would otherwise
Here is an example of what I write about frequently, copyright renewals that doom a book to obscurity, books that hardly anyone cares about for which the rights owner is not obvious but desperately need to be put online. The case in point is Methodology of the Social Sciences by Felix Kauffman, a member of the Mises Circle (the guy who wrote all
The article today on John Wanamaker further confirms my thinking that How They Succeeded is one of the best books that the Mises Institute has ever published, simply because it chronicles the lives of the most successful men and women from the Gilded Age – the actual “greatest generation.” These people have so much to teach us. John Wanamaker is
A new policy at Princeton prohibits (unless a special waver is granted) professors from assigning exclusive rights to publishers. This might at first appear to be a mandate but it is really a liberation. Professors have been browbeat for generations by publishers who demand all rights to an author’s work, which, under the law, they can keep for a
Tonight at the Acton University , I heard a lecture by Immaculée Ilibagiza, a Tutsi refugee from the Rwandan slaughter from 1994, when tribal genocide left some one million people dead. In particular, it was the Hutus who were killing the Tutsis and certainly she was among the targets. She survived by living 91 days in a tiny bathroom, hiding with
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.
