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Somehow, someway, it always comes back to the central bank. With economic anxiety growing, trouble in Latin America , frustration at the length of the recession, suspicions that matters are going to get worse before they are better, and, above all, terror that stock prices could fall ever further, Alan Greenspan is letting it be known that rate

In all discussion of 9-11, one year later, much attention is given to the firefighters, police, and emergency workers whose services, as employees of the public sector, were called on that day. You may hear about the innocents who died on the airplanes that were hijacked and used as missiles. The people you won’t hear about are those who were

In the 19th century, notes Murray N. Rothbard, debates on monetary issues were highly public and intensely controversial. Do you favor the national bank? The gold standard? Bimetallism? What is your opinion of the free silver movement? What is most important: a highly liquid money stock that can prop up commodity prices, or a sound dollar that

How wonderful to be here with so many Members and supporters, scholars in our academic community, students whom the Mises Institute has backed now teaching yet another generation, so many friends of our work. It offers us all a chance to step back and observe what can be done for an ideal even now. And of course we recall those who gave so much

There are some things that a state just cannot do, no matter how much power it accumulates or employs. Some proposed policies are just impossible. It was Ludwig von Mises who first framed the issue with regard to socialism. A strict socialist system robs society of everything essentially economic (money prices for capital goods, the matrix of

Every new president in memory has plotted a grand “tax reform,” and the outlines of George W.’s are becoming ever more clear. The Washington Post reports that the administration—particular treasury secretary Paul O’Neill—is seriously considering a move away from the income tax toward a national consumption tax. The purpose is not to yield lower

Like all government operations (public schools, domestic security, tax collection), the Post Office has to continually reform itself to avoid a complete public-relations meltdown. Thus did the Post Office become the Postal Service some thirty years ago. The name change was supposed to indicate how its management was going to be less like

Following the media campaign against Lott, many people were astonished by the Senator’s willingness to jettison all political principle for the sake of saving his status as Majority Leader. Why would a conservative Republican suddenly find himself embracing the full panoply of the left-wing racial agenda and flog himself so mercilessly? Consider

It’s obvious Iraq doesn’t want war and the Bush administration does. The administration claims war would be a preemptive strike, but more honest commentators freely admit, as does Thomas Friedman of the New York Times , that oil plays a huge role in the continuing drama, even the decisive role. “Any war we launch in Iraq will certainly be—in

Everyone is at work on a “stimulus plan” for doing something about the recession. But the much-publicized disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats is not about economic theory as such. There has been no critical thinking applied to the subject of why the recession, the longest in the postwar period, continues. Rather, the disagreement is