One myth upheld even by many people who has a basically sound outlook on monetary issues is the view that an inverted yield curve (where short term interest rates are higher than long term interest rates) will cause a recession. It is a well known fact that the yield curve tends to invert just before recession, so therefore many people have
In case you haven’t already read it, see my analysis of the American health care system which exposes some of the lies of Michael Moore by pointing out that it is far better compared to other countries’ health care systems than he would have you believe and that it’s real shortcomings is due to government
Alan Greenspan is in the news a lot currently because of the release of his new book. I haven’t read the book. Nor will I read it if it means that I have to buy it or if reading it means that Alan Greenspan in any other way will financially benefit from it. Enriching a hypocritical fraud like Greenspan goes against my principles. To see why he is
How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq. But there’s one thing Americans don’t talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. It’s about time that we think about the numbers. Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK, has just
As late as 1999, oil was trading at $10 per barrel and gold at $250 per ounce, down from their nominal peaks in 1980 of $39 and $850 respectively. And that’s not even adjusted for the fact that the value of a dollar was a lot lower in 1999 than in 1980. Many pundits at the time argued that prices would continue to go down. The Economist had a
One of the hottest (if not the hottest) intra-Austrian debates today is between what is sometimes referred to as deflationists and inflationists/stagflationists. This is not a policy debate of course, as all Austrians is anti-inflation, but rather a debate about whether the current recession will be associated with deflation or inflation. Examples
I tried to post this as a reply to the criticism of my criticism of Frank Shostak’s money supply definition that the person calling himself Newson posted under Frank’s most recent article . It strangely disappeared so that’s why it’s posted under a new post (slightly reformulated since it is a new post rather than a comment under a post): First of
The main argument for protectionism one hears today cites America’s huge current account deficit, which is cited as evidence for the need for trade barriers. One example of this was in the debate between CNN’s protectionist News anchor Lou Dobbs and free trader James Glassman from the American Enterprise Institute. Dobbs kept harping about the
Sometimes when you argue taxes with socialists they will answer the argument that taxes will reduce productive efforts since it reduces the rewards for productive efforts roughly as follows: “Yes, it is true that high marginal tax rates will reduce the rewards from productive efforts. But that is only the substitution effect. Countering the
Speculating in the stock market is a very popular activity. Millions of people do it regularly, and hundreds of millions of people around the world hire fund managers to let others trade for them. Yet, according to some economists, these people are just wasting their time. Sure, some of them might be lucky and earn a lot. But just as many will
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
