Oil prices have reached a 29-month high, reflecting a variety of factors including the prospects for war, expectations of lower supply, strikes and other unrest in Venezuela and Nigeria, and inflationary pressures. At the same time, the Producer Price Index recorded a 1.6 percent jump in January, the biggest across-the-board increase since January
The National Bureau of Economic Research dates the peak of the last business cycle at March 2001, and has yet to call a trough, which is to say it hasn’t yet observed an end to the contraction or the beginnings of an economic recovery. The number of months we have traveled from the end of the last peak to the current day is 24. The NBER has used
The Austrian economists tell us that a price is more than a price. It is an objective expression of subjective judgments concerning human wants, now and in the future. It conveys information to us about how we ought to conduct ourselves: where capital should be directed, how much of what should be consumed now or later, which jobs to take and
Explaining why the opening blows in the War on Iraq did not go as planned, General William Wallace offered this revealing, damning, and now-famous comment: “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we had war-gamed against.” The remark “ignited the ire of the White House,” the Washington Post reports. Why? Wallace broke the
Public and social authority having collapsed in Iraq, property was suddenly unprotected and available for the taking. Swept up in the euphoria of the moment, everything in sight was seized. I speak not of the mobs in Basra that stripped clean the Sheraton Hotel as the U.S. military looked tolerantly on, or the masses in Baghdad who ran away
Only to the most naive did the Department of Homeland Security sound promising. To seasoned observers of government, the idea of a new $40 billion DC bureaucracy means only one thing: billions for those who somehow manage to get their hands on the cash. Who are these people? Those who build the building, the bureaucrats who work there, the
When Bush announced the end of fighting in Iraq, he also threw the first pitch in the great American sport of telling a foreign country, about which we know nothing, how to restructure itself to our liking. The preferred model, of course, is the United States, or, rather, the part of the United States that particularly appeals to the would-be
Let’s say you set out on a Saturday shopping trip, drive up to the mall, and see a sign that says “50% off everything!” That’s great news, right? Or let’s say you are in the market for a new car, and the sticker shock you experience is that cars are cheaper than they used to be. Amazing and wonderful! Or let’s say you are paying for your
Journalists pride themselves on their power of observation. It is observation that is the first step toward putting a picture of the world into words and print, bringing to the rest of us an image they have seen but we have not. Journalists are often very good at seeing small pictures, but not big pictures. Actually, in their profession, it is bad
On July 8, Doug Williams, a 48-year-old assembly-line worker at the Lockheed Martin plant in Meridian, Mississippi, walked out of a meeting with managers on how to get along with fellow employees—just the sort of meeting encouraged by federal law to assure that everyone appreciates the merit of diversity and that no one is being harassed in 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.
