Mises Search

The  IMF recently released a new study  pushing for governments around the world to implement “a global carbon tax” that would rise to $75/ton by 2030, in order to limit global warming to at most the “safe” ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius. In order to reassure the alarmed reader that such a carbon tax is feasible,  the IMF’s blog post  on the new

Oct. 31 marks the 11th anniversary of the release of the famous bitcoin whitepaper. It is worthwhile to take stock of the first crypto-currency’s impressive achievements to date, while also warning of the future perils it faces. Bitcoin has defied the critics repeatedly, being declared “dead” many times over. (In this respect it’s appropriate that

A recent NYT article from this year’s economics Nobel Prize winners , Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, argues that “economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormously consequential finding from their research: Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they are usually assumed to be.” Yet as we’ll see, Duflo and

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has had a long-standing call for a 2% wealth tax on any individuals with a net worth exceeding $50 million, and a 3% tax on wealth exceeding $1 billion. Yet when pressed on how to pay for her “Medicare for All” plan, Warren upped the ante to a 6% wealth tax for those fortunes exceeding $1 billion.

The Committee on Energy and Commerce recently  released more details  of the so-called CLEAN Future Act, which “formally adopts the goal of achieving of a 100 percent clean economy by 2050.” Besides the manipulative name, the proposal (a) doesn’t even bother  trying  to justify its central goal and (b) includes a grab bag of proposals that

There’s a lot to be said regarding the Fed’s surprise announcements—including its Sunday surprise of $700 billion in renewed QE  and the complete elimination of all reserve requirements  for banks—but here let me just focus on one element: the tendency for Fed officials and all the pundits to treat injections of “liquidity” as if they don’t count

Joe Weisenthal, who made his name in financial circles while an editor at Business Insider from 2008–2014, has been wondering aloud on his popular Twitter account why so many analysts think it’s weird for the world to be experiencing negative interest rates. Since Weisenthal has collected his thoughts into a recent article at Bloomberg , it’s

The legacy of slavery in America is once again becoming a hotly discussed topic. The New York Times has launched The 1619 Project , commemorating the 400 th anniversary of the first African slaves brought to the colony of Virginia. The project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the

John Cochrane has an entertaining and informative blog called “The Grumpy Economist,” offering insights centered in the Chicago School approach that nonetheless will resonate with the Austrian reader. However, in a recent post Cochrane erroneously claimed that people living in high-rent areas of California were effectively using a different

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California who taught courses on energy economics. He originally endorsed the standard view among economists that if some physical scientists are right that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to substantial warming,