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President Bush began his second term with a big push for “Social Security privatization.” I put the words in quotes to point out that neither his plan, nor any mainstream plan, is actual privatization. What he proposed was the gradual replacement of a publicly funded welfare program — those premiums you pay are really just taxes — with a mandatory

We all want to live well and no one wants their living standard to decline. That makes sense, right? It’s just the way we are made. What does not make any sense is the strange article of faith that has descended over Washington, DC, that says that no prices must ever be permitted to decline due to recessionary pressures. All resources in the

True Money Supply Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute When central bankers blast central banks for being reckless, you know the problem is serious. Indeed, it seems that everyone suddenly really cares about inflation. Everywhere you go, this is the talk, at the grocery, the gas station, among your neighbors. Price increases have been persistent in

Americans, perhaps like all people, have a remarkable capacity for tuning out unpleasantries that do not directly affect them. I’m thinking here of wars on foreign lands, but also the astonishing fact that the United States has become the world’s most jail-loving country, with well over 1 in 100 adults living as slaves in a prison. Building and

Christopher Ratte, professor in the department of classics at the University of Michigan, was recently turned into a jailbird and had his son taken away from him, all in the name of protecting the child from the father. He had taken his 7-year old son to a baseball game in Detroit and ordered him lemonade. What was served up was a “Mike’s Hard

The web loves nothing more than a good brawl, so people often write me to ask me to respond to a critic of LRC or the Mises Institute. There’s certainly no shortage of them, and they come from the Left, the Right, and everything in between. My first thought on the request is that the archive speaks for itself, and a response would amount to little

When buildings collapse following an earthquake anywhere in the world, the first instinct is to presume Mother Nature is at fault. The second is to wonder why the buildings weren’t built to account for the risk of earthquakes. The third step is where people go really wrong. They blame the builders for failing to observe building codes and the

The first conference hosted by the Mises Institute was on the gold standard. How well I can recall the names we were called in Washington, DC. Reactionaries, Neanderthals, irrelevant to the modern debate, worshippers of a barbarous relic, throwbacks, pipe dreamers, and the rest: all designed to make us shut up about the most important issue in

At this point it is just a waiting game for the National Bureau of Economic Research to declare that we have been in recession. Of course they work from past data; we all do. But the data will show what has been true for months. Investment is falling. Unemployment is rising. The trends are consistent with every single recession on record. Have a

Concerning the issue of age discrimination, the Supreme Court, in Meacham v. Knolls, said that the burden of proof resides on the employer. If a company lays off too many older people (meaning, incredibly, people older than 40), it is under the gun, and must show that factors other than age account for the disparate impact. Otherwise, the courts