Mises Search

Over the last few years I’ve been freely dispensing financial advice to young people. I usually preface my remarks by saying, “I feel funny telling you what to do with your life, but since I’m bald you know I’m older and that I worry a lot.” In the present article I’ll summarize my recommendations. I am comfortable reproducing them for wide

Without question, the legal system is the one facet of society that supposedly requires state provision. Even such champions of laissez-faire as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises believed a government must exist to protect private property and define the “rules of the game.” However, their arguments focused on the necessity of law itself. They

Ever since Ben Bernanke began flooding the banking system with trillions of new dollars in the fall of 2008, economists and other pundits have disagreed on whether the US is in store for a grinding deflation or an accelerating inflation. Part of the disagreement stems from some people using the terms to refer to prices, whereas others refer to

Many naïve observers of the market economy dismiss concern with the “bottom line” as a purely arbitrary social convention. To these critics, it seems senseless that a factory producing, say, medicine or shoes for toddlers stops at the point when the owner decides that profit has been maximized. It would certainly be physically possible to produce

Ever since Rick Perry derided Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, economists and other pundits have jumped into the fray. Progressive blogger Matt Yglesias says it’s “nuts” for anyone to talk like this, because Social Security merely relies on future economic growth — just like a private pension plan. Free-market economist Alex Tabarrok responded

1. Total War The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. The division of labor cannot function effectively amidst a war. Warfare among primitive tribes did not suffer this drawback because the warring parties had not been engaged in trade before the hostilities. Thus they engaged in total war. Things were different in Europe (before the

As most people know, economists are a strange lot. We view the world from an unusual perspective. This allows us to see things that others miss — such as the obvious fact that Superman needs an agent — but alas, it renders us oddballs. On a recent trip to the grocery store, it occurred to me that much of what I see during a typical outing differs

In a money economy, the money commodity is on one side of every transaction, and hence reduces the number of relevant prices. The direct exchange ratio between any two commodities can easily be computed from their respective money prices. The “price” or purchasing power of money is the array of goods and services for which a unit of money can be

Last week the Fed announced “Operation Twist,” in which the central bank will buy $400 billion of longer-dated Treasury securities while selling the same amount of shorter-dated Treasuries. This episode epitomizes everything that is wrong with the modern, statist view of money. The Goofy Name Just the fact that it’s an “operation” is disturbing.

Recently a video of Elizabeth Warren has gone viral, garnering more than half a million views in the first ten days. After lambasting the policies of the Bush administration, Warren goes on to critique the claim that rich people have a right to the income from their activities. Warren argues that it is only fair that the rich give back to the