A perennial among the nostrums of statist “economists” is complaining about the populace’s penchant for buying and holding precious metals, notably gold. The French used to be mentioned frequently in this vein. FDR, of course, just made it illegal for Americans to own gold bullion or coin after 1933. So it’s tiresome and worrisome to see the
The scientific debate may be “over” in the words of those eager to grasp the levers of power offered by popular fears of global warming, but the political debate rages on. The US House Energy Committee’s is currently conducting hearings on Dr. Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph of millennial temperatures that I discussed in an earlier
Statism resounds in the last two paragraphs of this article (NO subscription required) in this week’s Economist . The interesting story is a particularly stark example of how the use of cell phones can and does promote economic wellbeing, this in the Indian state of Kerala. But at the end of the short article, the writer (and/or the author of the
If you subscribe to wsj.com, they are starting a new forum today, kicked off by Brad DeLong and Arnold Kling (of the Cato Institute). After a tit-for-tat in which these big boys seem mostly to agree, participation is invited from readers as to what they think of the New Deal. The participation seems remarkably well informed on the superficial
He only got four letters, (P-a-u-l), but my favorite candidate for president was mentioned in this article in the Economist (NO subscription required for this article) about the effect of the Internet on presidential campaigns. The name appears in the chart showing prominence on the Internet on YouTube and MySpace. Most of the candidates are
The department of some firms will do anything for a buck : “JPMorgan and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors launched today the JPMorgan Environmental Index-Carbon Beta (JENI-Carbon Beta), the first bond index designed to address the risks of global warming. The JENI-Carbon Beta, a United States high-grade corporate bond index, enables credit
The front page of today’s (March 28) Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required) a change of heart on the part of Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Alan S. Blinder that free trade is good. It seems he has in mind the millions of American jobs now threatened by the unprecedented ease with which information
Perhaps the most benign and certainly one of the most intense, forms of collectivism in the past century, the Israeli kibbutz , seems to be breathing its last. I say benign because kibbutzniks have always been free to leave their kibbutz , a course that may not have been actionable until the 1948 war establishing Israel pushed back the sea of
The government, famed for building bridges to nowhere, can’t replace a bridge blown down by Hurricane Katrina in four times the time required for a private company to replace its bridge just downriver from it, blown down at the same time. And the private company is a railroad , no less! The front page of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal is graced
A new book by NYU Professor William Silber has just come out offering an explanation for the 4-1/2-month shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange in 1914 on the eve of World War I. First, he points out that the explanation given at the time (to protect share prices on the market) doesn’t even make sense, so it must have been a lie. Silber says it
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.