Thanks to a couple of senators who don’t always act like intellectual bodyguards of the House of Bush, Rumsfeld admits to $3.9 billion a month as the cost of the occupation of Iraq. Given Pentagon financial fibs, it’s probably double that, of course. Meanwhile, Bush describes military dictatorship as freedom .
Over two centuries, “periodic catastrophic declines that destroy years of accumulated profits are the norm, not the exception,” says David Schwartz in The Observer.
“With American corporations under increasing pressure to cut costs and build global supply networks, two senior I.B.M. officials told their corporate colleagues around the world in a recorded conference call that I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash
See this latest Ben S. Bernanke speech on “ An Unwelcome Fall in Inflation? “, writes George R. Zachar. “Not only does he rehabilitate the Phillips Curve, but there is this gem: ‘... in a situation of insufficient aggregate demand, deflation or very low inflation might prevent the Fed from achieving full employment, at least by means of the Fed’s
The protectionist US is blocking Vietnamese river-raised catfish that is not only cheaper than the pond-raised US variety, but tastes far better. It wasn’t enough to invade that country and kill 2.5 to 3.0 million people; now the US is waging a catfish war against Vietnamese businessmen. (Courtesy of George Natalino.)
“In today’s economic slowdown, it has become clear that both the early-’90s pessimists and the late-’90s boosters misunderstood the true source of economic value. Manufacturing and technology generate wealth only when they make matter and information serve human desire. Desire is the true source of economic value,” writes Virginia Postrel in Wired
‘ Susannah Camic in the Yale Review of Books on The Great Tax Wars: From Lincoln to T.R. to Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America by Steven Weismann.
If you want a protectionist argument made, so much better to get a free-trader to do it. Here Doug Bandow opposes free trade in pharmaceuticals. Are American drug prices “too high”? Well, they are market prices, given the anti-competition FDA, so beloved of the pharmaceutical industry; the anti-competitive patent laws, so beloved of the
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.
