Few people complain about high interest rates or having trouble finding credit during periods of sustained growth. Wages rise, assets increase in value, and capital is abundant. The last time we heard all the fallacious arguments about inflation not being that bad and low interest rates being essential for growth was in the early 1990s, when
If you were to pick up a copy of the Financial Times (yes, the pink newspaper) next weekend and read the column with the weighty title, “Pause For Thought,” you would probably think the author is just another typical left-wing commentator hired to give some counter opinion in a paper where capitalism is usually presented in a positive light. In
Review of Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise, by Edward Younkins, Lexington Books, August 2002, 360 pp., $26.95 paperback. Remember the mid-’90s, when the media buzz was about downsizing and about jobs being replaced everywhere by computers and machines? In the memorable words of Jeremy Rifkin, we had entered a new
Everybody knows that New Orleans was founded by the French. But the area where we stand in Alabama also used to be part of the French North American empire in the 18th century. Not far from here, north of Montgomery, was a military fort called Fort Toulouse. The French controlled one third of the continent at the time. The reason why I have to
Most European economies have been in recession, or close to it, since the beginning of 2012. Unemployment rates are reaching record highs. Meanwhile, a debate has been raging about the deleterious effects of “austerity” measures. Various heads of government, finance ministers, and European Union officials have declared that austerity has gone too
Fr. James Sadowsky is a Jesuit priest and retired professor of philosophy at Fordham U. He used to be a member of the Rothbard circle in Manhattan in the 1960s. I’ve known him for a few years and visit regularly in NY. He is 79 and seemingly in good health. I interviewed him last time we met, and this interview appears in the current issue of Le
Could this be the reason why Austrian thinkers tend to live to very old age? The Scotsman reports that “New research from sociologist Dr William Cockerham and colleagues from the University of Alabama in the United States has found that differences in attitudes to looking after your body and your health are predicted by your political
Howard Gleckman in BusinessWeek on our health care industry , which doesn’t have “powerful market forces that drive retail costs down,” in Wal-Mart fashion. Sometimes, however, Americans use more care because they think it’s free, or almost free. And that’s one big reason why health care hasn’t become Wal-Mart-ized. When you buy that DVD player,
Quantitative finance analysts, or “quants” in the financial jargon, played a prominent role in the subprime crisis. Using a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing, they were the Wall Street geniuses who assessed the risks on all those exotic mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps. Their models were telling them that the risks
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.
