Mises Search

“Cure of Folly” Hieronymus Bosch (1475–1480)   How about a bit of reality? Not the ridiculous promises from Washington: the absurd talk of “green shoots” while unemployment soars and investment falls; the silly guarantees that GM has a bright future, even as its stock price falls to less than the price of a Snickers bar; the nonsense about how if

The entire presumption of the Obama-proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency is that banks and mortgage companies are under-regulated by the state. This is why the financial meltdown took place — never mind that the federal regulatory Gosplan includes tens of thousands of pages purporting to regulate the mortgage industry alone. Let’s leave

It was common on the Left to intimate that George W. Bush was like Hitler, a remark that would drive the National Review crowd through the roof but which I didn’t find entirely outrageous. Bush’s main method of governance was to stir up fear of foreign enemies and instigate a kind of nationalist hysteria about the need for waging war and giving up

Just how bad is the current plague of economic fallacy? Consider the front page of the New York Times today (July 15, 2009): SEACHANGE IS SET IN A HEALTH PLAN — House Democratic leaders took a big step toward guaranteeing health insurance for most Americans on Tuesday as they unveiled a bill that detailed how they would expand coverage, slow the

Travel with me back to yesteryear, the early days of the Reagan administration, when taxes were being cut and spending increases were being curbed (actual spending cuts were few), and when journalists were losing their heads about the supposedly catastrophic state of the economy. The prevailing ethos in those days in the White House was somewhat

Writing in The State and Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin summed up the economic aim of socialism as follows: “To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service.” Incredible, isn’t it? After centuries of treatises and miles of paper and tubs of ink, this is the great historical turning point: government employees carrying sacks

There is something affected, something not believable, something agitpropish, about all the cheers for the glorious economic recovery we are supposed to be experiencing. Even some of the recovery’s biggest boosters don’t quite believe it. I’m thinking of the reporter on National Public Radio a few days ago who, at the end of a segment, offered a

It must be really painful to be an economist of the mainstream today — at least, it should smart to some extent. In a financial and economic calamity of the current scale, people naturally want to know who issued the warnings about the real-estate bubble and its likely aftermath. When private-sector jobs have not grown at all in ten years, and

In the private sector, there is always a test of success. The business must make a profit. It can sustain some losses, but the clock is always running on those. At some point, after all cuts have been made and costs are trimmed to a minimum, the business has to close shop. The summer of losses must become the autumn of profits, or else it’s all

The economic meltdown has put the country on the fast track to socialism, but through a series of tiny steps. One need only to examine the supposed victories in the war on depression to see how this is happening. The latest is the claim that the Obama administration has successfully renegotiated many mortgage obligations in a way that allows