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Politics brings out the worst in everyone, which is one good reason to completely depoliticize society. This way we can all busy ourselves in productive work or leisure, instead of wasting vast time watching these clowns on television promise the impossible to us. What we are being offered on television is two flavors of dictatorship. One party

What an enthusiastic, smart, and committed bunch of students we had this summer at the Mises University. The faculty agrees. This was an exceptional year. What encouragement it is to see so many young people taking up the cause of the free economy. We’ve become used to receiving more qualified applications than we can accept. But we were stunned

The frenzied reaction of the middle class all over the country toward Sarah Palin has no real precedent that I can remember. Indeed, the reaction especially among women is completely understandable. She provides a much welcome cultural break from the chip-on-the-shoulder, grudge-against-the-world model of public women that have been held up to us

It was the singular achievement of Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression to have demonstrated that the Great Depression was a crisis manufactured and prolonged by the attempts to stop an inevitable downturn. The policy response — creating more money, propping up prices, ginning up employment, and a host of other devices — took a

[This talk was delivered on September 13, 2008, at the Vancouver Mises Circle .] This past week, the government announced that it would take Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the mortgage giants, under conservatorship, which is a nice way of saying that they will be nationalized. We don’t use the word nationalize any more. We can try an experiment and

What caused this? It is a simple question, and yet answers are all over the map, as you might expect. Here’s mine in two words: fiat money . The word “fiat” here means by order of the state, which is to say that it has no independent worth and is eventually worth nothing. The possibility of precisely that happening emerged in August 15, 1971.

[ Originally published September 2008 .] What we’ve seen in the last week is the state at work — and by the state, I do not mean a particular set of leaders. If we watch carefully, we can gain insight into what the state is and why our fundamental problem extends far above and below the political party system. The moment is complicated by the

Anyone who has read a good economics book would be quickly reduced to laughter and tears by George Bush’s ridiculous economic address to the nation. He put on his 9-11 suit and tried to warn Americans about the impending disaster: that their access to an infinite stream of paper money might be imperiled if they don’t cough up hundreds of billions

I’m fully aware that Paulson and Bernanke have some nefarious scheme in mind to reverse the thrilling defeat of their criminal bailout package, a package shot down by independent members of Congress on both sides. But reflect for a few minutes on what it means that the House did this. It was a revolutionary act in the best sense of that term. The

The ghost of FDR is everywhere, haunting both Washington and New York. The terrible trouble is that the minds in power have confused an economic wrecker with an angel of mercy. They are following his confusions and prescriptions day to day in an attempted repeat of the longest economic calamity in modern American history. They have looked at the