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A couple of weeks before Katrina, I had purchased a selection of several dozen bromeliads from the estate of the recently deceased past president of the American Bromeliad Association and moved them from the back yard of her house on Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans to Auburn, Alabama. At the time my biggest fear was that the

[This article is taken from the introduction to The Bastiat Collection .] “And now I would appeal with confidence to men of all schools, who prefer truth, justice, and the public good to their own systems. Economists! Like you, I am the advocate of LIBERTY; and if I succeed in shaking some of these premises which sadden your generous hearts,

The old monetarist tale of the Great Depression, thoroughly refuted in the Austrian literature, is that the Federal Reserve failed to provide enough inflation (i.e., money supply) when the market started to weaken and it allowed the money supply to collapse, and, as a result, the banks failed and the economy went into a tailspin of depression.

[This Mises Daily was originally published May 7, 2008. An MP3 version of this article, read by the author, is available for download .] It seems that we may never rid ourselves of the broken-window fallacy. Hurricane Katrina certainly did not stop economists from proclaiming the silver lining of natural disasters. On September 9, 2005, Labor

[This article originally appeared in The Free Market , April 1998; Volume 16, Number 4.] Listen to the MP3 audio version of this commentary . British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for doing “too little” in response to the Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century that killed one million people and brought about the emigration of millions

Multimillionaires like Hillary Clinton and Lou Dobbs butter their bread by defending middle-class Americans. They are correct about the problem, but their suggested remedies — protectionism, welfare, regulation, subsidy, and tax reform — would only make the problem worse. The middle class actually faces many important economic problems, but in

Introduction Do Skyscrapers Predict? Table 1: Skyscrapers and Economic Crisis Figure 1: Skyscrapers and Economic Crisis Cantillon Effects in Skyscrapers Cantilloned Buildings and Business Cycles When the Skyscraper Index Is Wrong References Notes [This article originally appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring

“Great Depression” is a strong term, but what exactly does it mean? Depressions are a normal part of a business cycle that are now often called recessions, downturns, or corrections. They occur in any economy where the financial markets are based on fractional-reserve banking. Depressions only become “great” when normal to severe depressions are

1. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to as low as 1% so that after inflation we had negative interest rates. 2. As a result, mortgage rates fell to an all time low. 3. Low rates caused borrowing and lending to explode, particularly in real estate. For example, commercial banks more than doubled the amount of real-estate loans they made. 4.

[This talk was delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit, November 1, 2008, Auburn, Alabama. An MP3 audio version of this talk is available for download .]   Today we stand at a point in time that is the beginning of the end of an economic era when the US dollar dominated the global economy. The dollar still dominates world financial