The planned economy was all the rage in 1937, when Prentice-Hall published a 1,000-page tome on The Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium by Thirty-Five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen . The “question that confronts us today is not if we shall plan, but how we shall plan,” wrote Lewis Mumford in the Foreword. All the
Since 1990, we’ve heard about what a low rate of inflation we’ve experienced. In some ways, it might appear low compared with what we experienced in the late 1970s. The dollar of 1976 was worth only 63 cents by 1981, once the Nixon-Carter inflation had done its work. The cultural and economic consequences were devastating. A generation was
There’s an episode of “I Dream of Jeannie” from years ago when Jeannie blinks into existence tomorrow’s newspaper. Everyone is amazed and riveted by the implications of knowing tomorrow’s headlines today. Many possibilities here! In the case of the war on terror, we could have known tomorrow’s headlines five years ago. In particular, this
In November 2000, Clinton signed a bill passed by Congress that ordered the states to adopt new, more onerous drunk-driving standards or face a loss of highway funds. That’s right: the old highway extortion trick. Sure enough, states passed new, tighter laws against Driving Under the Influence, responding as expected to the feds’ ransom note. The
John Nash, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics, praised the gold standard in a recent talk at Fordham. Here’s an excerpt from the news report: Nash said that various interest groups that subscribe to Keynesian, or short-term, economic theories have sold the public on the notion that inflation is acceptable or that “bad money is better than
The Clearing House Association says that the Fed has to keep its business under wraps else negative rumors lead to runs. Well, it didn’t say runs; it only alludes to unnameable “negative
In 2012, Barack Obama warned that the United States would fall into a depression if Ron Paul’s plan to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget were enacted. Wait, I beg your pardon. It wasn’t Obama who warned that budget cuts would lead to a depression. It was Mitt Romney. Romney went on to become the nominee of the self-described free-market
Ludwig von Mises didn’t like references to the “miracle” of the marketplace or the “magic” of production or other terms that suggest that economic systems depend on some force that is beyond human comprehension. In his view, we are better off coming to a rational understanding of why markets are responsible for astounding levels of productivity
It’s easy to get discouraged in the Age of Obama, a man who can say, in Castro’s Cuba, that there is not much difference between communism and capitalism. And in his warped mind, I guess it’s sort of true, since his program is a mixture. That is, it’s fascist. Combine his corporatism with envy, perpetual war, negative interest rates, the police
[Delivered at a memorial service at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 20, 1995.] Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a worldwide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. ”Give me a short description of his thought and contributions,” said the reporter when this free-market giant died at 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.
