Mises Search

Recently the Minnesota Department of Human Rights — a funny title in itself — declared that the practice of “ladies’ night” was illegal gender discrimination. Apparently, five establishments in the Twin Cities area were denying men “full and equal enjoyment” of their services because they charged women lower cover and drink prices. Besides the

In a recent piece I reported the shocking ignorance in a Huffington Post article on the alleged harmlessness of the federal deficit. Several readers wrote to tell me that as bad as the HuffPo article was, James Galbraith’s interview with Ezra Klein was even worse. They were right. In today’s piece I’ll walk through some of Galbraith’s biggest

Although Austrian economists agree on most of the “big picture” issues, even so there are some internal controversies. One of the most heated debates within the Austrian camp centers on the economic benefits (or lack thereof) of the practice of fractional-reserve banking. Just about every Austrian today thinks that our current financial system —

In a previous article , I explained the sense in which our fractional-reserve, fiat financial system is built upon debt-based money. In this perverse arrangement, new dollars come into existence through the creation of government and private debt. Going the other way, if the private sector and the federal government ever began seriously paying

Just about everyone is drawn to the libertarian respect for property rights. Yet most people draw back from fully embracing property rights, and taking libertarianism to its fulfillment in “anarchocapitalism” or free-market anarchy. “Sure,” the cynics say, “it would be great to live in a society without the government and taxes, but who would

Different groups often notice different aspects of the same phenomenon — this is the point of the famous tale of the blind men encountering an elephant. When it comes to the Federal Reserve, Austrians usually focus on how its tinkering with interest rates leads to the boom–bust cycle. However, plenty of non-Austrians hate the Federal Reserve

One of economic historian Bob Higgs’s outstanding contributions is the “ratchet effect.” During a crisis, the size and scope of government grow tremendously. After the crisis subsides, government shrinks, but not to the precrisis level. In consequence, leviathan expands over the decades, leaping from one crisis to the next. We see Higgs’s thesis

One of the ways politicians get away with systematic theft is by fostering euphemisms to describe their activities. Murray Rothbard pointed out some of the typical tricks. More recently, even the supposedly “right-of-center” economists Greg Mankiw and Martin Feldstein do their part to muddy the terminological waters, making it harder for the

Economists in the Misesian tradition stress the primacy of theory in the social sciences. When trying to figure out the Great Depression, for example, we can’t approach the topic with a blank slate and let the facts “speak for themselves.” Mises argued that in order for us to even know which facts to consider as relevant, we need to have an

I am always about 18 months behind a new trend. In high school, I refused to roll up the cuffs of my jeans, because I thought it was dumb. More recently, I resisted getting a “smart phone” until I lost my phone in a cab. Since I had to buy a new phone anyway, I opted for the cheapest Blackberry available. And even then I didn’t get around to