Mises Search

An Earth scientist’s  recent article  making the rounds on social media highlights a terrifying conversation he had with “a very senior member” of the IPCC, which is the UN’s body devoted to studying climate science. The upshot of their conversation was that millions of people will die from climate change, a conclusion that leads the author to

One of the popular rhetorical moves in the climate change debate is for advocates of aggressive government intervention to claim that “97% of scientists” agree with their position, and so therefore any critics must be unscientific “deniers.” Now these claims have been dubious from the start; people like David Friedman have demonstrated that the

At his entertaining blog, John Cochrane has a good thought experiment showing the flaws with conventional measures of income inequality. However, after making his great point, Cochrane summarizes by writing: “Income” is really a fairly meaningless concept. We do not live in the Ancien Regime, or a Jane Austen novel in which people are described

Ludwig von Mises famously argued that people must choose between outright socialism and unfettered capitalism, because there is no coherent “middle ground” between the two. The allegedly reasonable compromise of a highly interventionist state — where the authorities retain nominal private property but issue edicts regulating how legal owners may

Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau  recently proposed  a federal ban on certain single-use plastics, arguing, “We have a responsibility to work with our partners to reduce plastic pollution, protect the environment, and create jobs and grow our economy.” As with  similar measures  in California, Hawaii, and New York, the proposed Canadian ban on

A  recent article in the Guardian  trumpeted the findings of a  new study published in  Science  that found massive tree planting would be — by far — the cheapest and most effective approach to mitigating climate change. Ironically, the new thinking shows the pitfalls of political approaches to combating so-called “negative externalities.” The

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.] The ultimate purpose of this booklet is to give the reader a solid grasp of how money works in today’s world. Yet before diving into the particulars of central banks, repo markets, and LIBOR—all topics that will

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020.] The ultimate purpose of this booklet is to give the reader a solid grasp of how money works in today’s world. Yet before diving into the particulars of central banks, repo markets, and LIBOR—all topics that

Although the roughly two million affected residents of Northern California are recovering from the rolling blackouts imposed by utility PG&E, the company has warned that these “fire safety outages” may be periodically required  for another decade . Naturally, California Governor Gavin Newsom decried the debacle as yet another example of “greed and

In a recent article , I contrasted the Austrian School approach to product safety with the “Law & Economics” tradition that is associated with the Chicago School and UCLA. In today’s article I will show the contrast on the issue of air pollution. Again we will see that not only is the Austrian approach more technically accurate, but it also sounds