Yet another puzzle for mainstream economists....why don’t people vote? In his National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “What, Me Vote?” Richard Freeman finds that despite legal and regulatory changes designed to reduce the cost of voting, the proportion of the voting age that actually vote is declining. Huum...maybe the benefits of
The Birth of the GOP (Robert B. Ekelund and Mark Thornton, Milken Review , 3rd Quarter, 2003, p. 5-6): We certainly agree with Jeff Frankel that the “Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility, trade restriction, big government, and failing-grade microeconomics.” However, we would argue that there is less mystery to this
The St. Louis Fed not only has one of the best webpages for economic data, including Monetary Trends , but I also found these two items: Natural disasters are never good for the economy, but politicians turn natural disasters to their own benefit . War may sometimes be necessary, but we should never believe that “good for the economy” is a valid
NY Mulls Extending Smoking Ban to Cars as Protests Mount (CNSnews.com). Inevitably, the ban has given rise to a thriving underground. “The New York Times Monday included a feature on drug dealers turned contraband tobacco dealers on the city streets in the wake of the ban. According to the article, former marijuana pushers make between $100 and
Mainstream economists miss the target again. Fed economist Marvin Goodfriend shows that the US is an inflation targeter....Laurence Ball and Niamh Sheridan find that inflation targeting doesn’t matter. All brought to you by the good people at NBER: “ Inflation Targeting in the United States ?” by Marvin Goodfriend. The paper begins by tracing the
The New York Times runs a piece on the poverty rate by Jared Bernstein that correctly says the old measure of poverty is dated and inaccurate, but concludes that an accurate rate should be higher than the official data. A better study is done by Robert Rector of Heritage, as published in the Review of Social Economy (1999), which calls for
The Mises Institute receives a constant stream of correspondence from around the world, and in this one item keeps coming up again and again. People often ask whether there have been any responses to Bryan Caplan’s essay “ Why I’m not an Austrian Economist “ (thanks to Google, the version on his personal site is far more widely circulated than the
This looks like a good case study in how the Austrian approach to competition is better than the mainstream view of competition and antitrust policy. It turns out that anticompetitive behavior might be good for the environment and fish markets and while “the focus of this article is fishery conservation, the analysis is potentially applicable to
Model-Rocket Bill Stirs Debate (NY): “Legislation pending in the Senate would exempt some model-rocket propellants from toughened restrictions on explosives that were imposed by Congress last year in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The proposed exemption grew out of complaints from rocket hobbyists who said the new regulations
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.
