NPR reports that: “Now, as the year’s second half begins, most economists are saying the worst of the recession is over, and that slow growth will begin in the fall.” I was going to insert a sarcastic comment about how these mainstream economists all predicted the bust, right? Or maybe a comment about how NPR works full time for the Obama
And you have to read pretty deeply to find that the new home-sales report from the Census Bureau “fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 355,000 in November, an 11.3 percent drop from October and its lowest rate since April. The numbers were much lower than analysts had predicted and seemed to belie trends in other housing data that gave
Deteriorating piano rolls can’t be preserved due to copyright law – an irony because the 1909 copyright act was passed precisely to keep piano rolls from driving live music from the market. If you go to link, prepare to click through to an interesting history of pressure group politics, luddite-style regulation, and state planning at the behest of
Well, I just gave myself a five minute education on an important topic, namely how the TSA and Congress and various other interests including the Obama admin are planning to tax and regulate smaller airlines known as general aviation , which is the sector of pilots and planes that is neither military nor scheduled commercial. Thanks to an ad at
The BBC reports that the government will ban employers from counting tips as part of the minimum wage. This “will benefit those working in industries such as restaurants.” That the news source can assert something that has been demonstrated as false for hundreds of years just boggles the mind. What the law will do is raise the price of employment:
Percy Greaves’s Pearl Harbor: Seeds and Fruits of Infamy is now published – a 1000-page tome that is the most comprehensive book on the topic now in print. The book comes as something of a shock, since the documents and interviews in here have been shrouded in a kind of mystery and secrecy for many decades. I had known that Bettina Greaves had
“Since Qaddafi’s regime enforced a strict ban on civilians owning firearms, they are using makeshift weapons to protect themselves. Ali said he is armed with a crowbar.” NYT
The NYT reports that Muhammad Yunus has been forced out of his own Grameen Bank under allegations of fraud and mismanagement. He denies the charges but one paragraph from the article certainly raises questions about Grameen’s operations: A Norwegian documentary alleged that the bank had improperly transferred $100 million donated by the Norwegian
by Peter L.P. Simpson, which includes the following: There is, one might even suppose, a reverse invisible hand at work. The free market is said to produce order and success as the unintended result of many producers and sellers and buyers independently pursuing their goals. So the controlled market seems to produce chaos and failure as the
This is F.A. Hayek in 1975 on Meet the Press . If you have never listened to a Mises.org podcast before, you must listen to this. I heard this Friday and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. A number of points stand out to me. 1) Hayek is amazing here. He holds the line. He is patient and explains very well. He refuses to relent. The core of his
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.
