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[October 24, 2000] The Washington Post recently reported that the nation’s largest statistical organization, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), has been miscalculating the consumer price index for over a year. Their headline read “Inflation Higher than Reported.” My first reaction was to think, “And this is news?” I then began to

Recently  Tom Lehman lamented one of the frustrations free market economists often face when reading economic journalism: opposing bad policy for the wrong reasons.One of the earliest memories I have of feeling this pain was in college and reading that the first President Bush wanted a decrease in the capital gains tax because it would result in

[An MP3 audio version of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available as a free download .]   A majority of Americans now give President Obama’s handling of the economy a negative rating and many economists and city officials are concerned that Obama’s gargantuan stimulus effort has not given the expected quick boost to the economy. Some argue

The seeds of my new book, Foundations of Economics: A Christian View , were sown at the Ludwig von Mises Institute back in the winter of 1999, which was definitely not the winter of our discontent. A year earlier, I had been interviewed by the school newspaper at the university where I had landed my first job out of graduate school. After the

[ Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism • By Ludwig von Mises • Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007 • xvi + 1143 pages]   Washington’s stunning economic power grabs — healthcare centralization, Keynesian fiscal stimulus, and Federal Reserve bailouts — are creating an unintended consequence: an increasing demand for freedom literature. Exhibit A would

[Originally published by the Center for Vision and Values (2011). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Keith Hocker, is available for download .]   Defenders of the Federal Reserve have been out in force recently declaring the triumph of Money Printing 2, James Grant’s suggested, more truthful term for “quantitative easing.” Some pundits

In the wake of the financial panic and economic recession of 2008, numerous macroeconomic policies are being re-evaluated. Some economists argue that the crisis demonstrates a need to move away from Ben Bernanke-type discretionary monetary policy and instead adopt some monetary policy rule. One such proposed rule is nominal GDP (NGDP) targeting,

Once again there is panic running through the halls of Congress, the Oval Office, and in the chattering classes that make up mainstream media over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. Most of the panic is a result of the inability of politicians to reach an agreement on government spending . If we hope to begin to recover true prosperity,

One of the points I like to stress in my introductory economics course, as well in my course on Economic Expansion and Development is that socialism, when implemented, results in poverty, starvation, death, and cultural ossification. The more hard-core socialist the system is, the worse its problems. Mary Anastasia O’Grady documents this in a

When I was a boy, one of my favorite holidays was Independence Day. I was an enthusiastic student of the War for Independence. My favorite book was the How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution by Felix Sutton. I spent a lot of my childhood reading about the colonial era, the lives of people like Sam Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson,