As trial lawyers continue to shake down U.S. businesses for conducting legitimate commercial practices, life insurers are now squarely in the crosshairs of the bar. According to The Wall Street Journal, about seventy-five life insurance companies face government probes for having had “race-based” premiums for their policies. The firm that is
Austrian economists and those who are part of the mainstream—especially the Chicago School—differ on many things, with one of the greatest divides being the subject of antitrust laws. As many writers on this page already have pointed out, Austrians hold that antitrust laws do not need to be reformed; they need to be abolished immediately.
As television cameras were replaying the collapse of the World Trade Towers Tuesday afternoon, panic buying of gasoline quickly set in. People who were suddenly fearful that they might not be able to purchase a tank of gasoline began to crowd gas stations in many cities, and not long afterward, unsurprisingly, gasoline prices soared to levels of
In his classic Economics in One Lesson , Henry Hazlitt reminded readers that the lessons of “good economics” versus “bad economics” must be relearned every generation. One would have hoped that the “bad” lesson would not have occurred so soon after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City, but it seems that fallacies are
In the days since the tragic attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, Americans have seen their lives turned upside down in the government’s show of force that is supposed to be protecting lives. Like so many other things the government does, however, this current fixation on security will do nothing but make our lives more insecure and
The 2001 Nobel Prize in economic sciences has been awarded to George A. Akerlof, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and A. Michael Spence for “their analyses of markets with asymmetric information” and their “advances in analyzing markets and the control of information.” As a first-year graduate student in economics, I was assigned George Akerlof’s famous paper,
With the latest news that the U.S. economy officially has been shrinking, it is time to admit the obvious: We are in a recession. Consumer spending is down, along with business investment. The only people making money these days are those who contract with the Pentagon. Some are claiming that the attacks of September 11 triggered this latest
I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice have finally agreed to a settlement in the infamous antitrust case against the House that Bill Gates Built. It seems that everyone has an opinion about this thing, but, as Austrian economists might have expected, most people have missed the boat when it
The college football national championship is decided--in large part--by computer programming, not on the field. While the format of major college football’s method of deciding the national champion has been debated for eons (polls or playoffs?), the current method of choosing a champion suffers from the same fate as modern economic methodology,
In the government’s never-ending quest to end the recession for which it is responsible, we have heard many references to consumer spending being partly responsible for not making things worse. However, it seems that consumers have been less than “patriotic,” as stores report somewhat lackluster sales for the Christmas shopping season, which
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.
