Mises Search

With the recent signing of the Air Safety Bill, President Bush has finally taken what many believe to be the only sensible response to the tragic events of 9/11: federalizing airport security.   Ostensibly “no-nonsense” commentators have pointed out the poor training and minimum wages of privately provided airport security personnel.  The recent

One of the most common justifications for government intervention is an alleged “market failure.”  There are countless mainstream economic models that purport to show the inefficiency of unregulated markets, which can ostensibly be improved by political means. These analyses, however, often abstract away from the real-world problems of dispersed

New York City is in trouble. Rainfall has been far below its historical level, raising the specter of water shortages. Fortunately, the government has a plan. A three-phase Drought Management Plan , to be specific. According to the City of New York’s Department of Environmental Protection : As conditions dictate the declaration of the successive

In a recent New York Times article , Hal Varian — a respected mainstream economist and textbook author — describes the contributions of Nobel Laureate John Nash: So what did John Nash actually do? Viewers of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind might come away thinking he devised a new strategy to pick up girls. Mr. Nash’s contribution was far

Until recently, most macroeconomic forecasters, assisted by mathematical models, were predicting economic recovery and rising stock indices. But the market has reminded us that reality doesn’t always correspond to the predictions of those who claim the mantle of “science.” As is so often the case, those economists who were more humble in their

The June 26 ruling by a 9th Circuit appeals court that the phrase “under God” is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion in public schools has reignited the familiar debate in American politics on the proper balance between the rights of minorities and the desires of the majority. Advocates of the ruling are predictably hailing it as

In a recent article for Slate , Steven Landsburg explains that he and his colleagues at the University of Rochester teach in one of the top-ranked economics departments in the world. He then makes the amusing admission that “somehow last summer, we managed to spend a week in a state of collective befuddlement, obsessing over a seemingly

Largely confined to the outer fringe of “scientific” economics, Austrians have to jump with glee at any mention—positive or negative—that their theories receive in mainstream journals. It is with this attitude that I examine Paul Samuelson’s article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics entitled “A Summing Up.” Historical Background This article

THE INTEREST PROBLEM Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s three-volume work, Capital and Interest , is a classic, both because of its brilliant analysis and its witty exposition.  The first volume provides a history and critique of all preceding explanations of the “interest problem.”  For Böhm-Bawerk, the task of the interest theorist was to explain why a

Because of their minority status, most budding Austrian economists must endure graduate training in the mainstream orthodoxy before earning their Ph.D.s. As a recent graduate of New York University, I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the major differences I perceived between Austrian economics and the neoclassical, New Keynesian