They could have cut to the chase years ago and admitted what Bush said yesterday : they are going to try to extract more money from the population via higher taxes to fund the transition (from a pure transfer program to an actual forced savings program). (Thanks LRC .) Coda: More detail from the New York Times , and it’s even worse (it’s always
And thus does the deficit soar to $427 billion . Whenever news stories dig up Fed officials, politicians, or bureaucrats who express grave concern about the deficit trend, we might imagine a group of thieves with a back up printing press worry about their spending habits. So long as they get away with it and believe they can evade the
So this is how the New York Times greets Thomas Woods’s book , which, far from being “conservative” in the sense of the Bush adminstration, celebrates old-style liberalism, as in laissez-faire, anti-war, pro-trade, anti-authoritarian state, pro-revisionist history, anti-corporatist, anti-coercion, pro-voluntarism, pro-decentralism. This completely
How nice to see Russell Robert’s The Invisible Heart getting some attention . It’s a wonderful novel about a high-school economics teacher and his attempt to explain to others close to him why economics matters and what it teaches us about the world. Roberts presents the economist as an idealist who chooses his vocation over other considerations
At last, journalists are looking into Chile’s system of “privatization.” This NYT piece points out an important difference with the US case: “Chile was careful before it started its private system to accumulate several years of budget surpluses, in contrast to the recent large deficits in the United States.” Even so, “the transition period has
Harold Ford of Tenn., via Talking Points and B rad DeLong , points the way to a likely consensus on Social Security reform (politics being the art of a compromise to tax you more, and all that): in exchange for private accounts, the cap on FICA taxes will be lifted, so that the 20% of the population that earns more then $87,000 has to pay the
A very insightful and fresh look at the Iraqi elections by Sudha Shenoy blogging at Liberty and Power. “Once again, ordinary people are the helpless meat in the sandwich between contenders for
Paul Cantor on his book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in An Age of Globalization : I was helped a great deal by the fact that an economics think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, had scheduled a conference on “the end of the nation state” for the fall of 2000 and invited me to participate. The conference was centered around a brilliant book by
Just as you thought the SocSec “privatization” couldn’t get any worse, The Washington Post reports more grim truths: they won’t be private, they won’t be managed by individuals, and you won’t withdraw these funds at retirement. (Pointer from FEE ). As for Bush’s promise of no tax increases, that depends on what the meaning of tax
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.
