The truth will out.
by Jeff Deist via Mises.org Inflation in the US is at forty-year highs, while interest rates on ten-year Treasury notes just hit 3 percent—signaling trouble for home buyers. Truck drivers pay more than $1,000 to fill their rigs with $5 per gallon diesel to deliver your increasingly expensive groceries and Amazon packages. Crime and homelessness […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org American policy makers have shown a surprising about of sanity so far in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While some war enthusiasts among the American punditry have certainly been agitating for World War III, the leadership in both the White House and Congress has repeatedly and straightforwardly refused most calls […]
by Daniel Lacalle via Mises.org There are numerous articles mentioning that Saudi Arabia may use the yuan, China’s domestic currency, for its oil exports. How much does Saudi Arabia export to China? According to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, the kingdom’s main exports are to China ($45.8B), India ($25.1B), Japan ($24.5B), South Korea […]
by Robert Aro via Mises.org This Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will address the world to likely announce the raising of interest rates. With the first rate hike in several years and the promise to reduce the balance sheet later this year, the stage for 2022 will be set. Also tomorrow, per CNN: …Moscow […]
by Lipton Matthews via Mises.org The decision of Western countries to punish Russia for invading Ukraine by lacing her with a wave of sanctions suggests that global leaders are failing to learn from history. Sanctions are an ineffective tool to curb the ambitions of rogue actors and they are unlikely to make autocrats think twice. Non-democratic regimes […]
by Tho Bishop via Mises.org Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nearing its second week. Vladimir Putin’s military continues its push west, with clear attempts to encircle Kyiv. To date, thankfully, America and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have held off pleas from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enforce a no-fly zone, which would risk the eruption […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org No, It’s Not “Putin’s Fault.” According to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, price inflation in February rose to the highest level recorded in more than forty years. According to the Consumer Price Index for February, year-over-year price inflation rose to 7.9 percent. It hasn’t been that high […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org The United States and its western European allies have in recent days repeatedly increased economic sanctions against not only the Russian regime, but against millions of ordinary Russians. It has done this by cutting much of Russian trade and Russian finance out of international markets. Moody’s and S&P global have both downgraded […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org Late last year, US secretary of state Anthony Blinken declared that “One country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” His words were directed at Russia after Moscow increasingly made it clear that it considers Ukraine to be part […]
by Robert Fellner via Mises.org The Canadian government is now freezing the bank accounts and personal assets of those who donated to support the Freedom Convoy, which is an organized political protest of the vaccine mandates. The deputy prime minister announced that they will retain these so-called emergency powers permanently going forward and will also seek to implement […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org The current advocates for US aggression against Russia would have us believe that Russia is some sort of peer of the United States and of Western Europe. Tom Rogan at the hawkish Washington Examiner, for example, insists that Russia is a “great power,” presumably comparable to the United States in […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org It has become something of a habit in both the American and Canadian media to insist that the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates is an “illegal protest.” They are “illegal border protests” one American news affiliate proclaims. Canada’s National Post dutifully refers to the protests in its headlines as illegal acts. […]
by Murray N. Rothbard via Mises Institute Every “radical” creed has been subjected to the charge of being “utopian,” and the libertarian movement is no exception. Some libertarians themselves maintain that we should not frighten people off by being “too radical,” and that therefore the full libertarian ideology and program should be kept hidden from […]
by Mitch Nemeth via Mises.org On February 14, Canadian deputy prime minister and minister of finance Chrystia Freeland announced a government crackdown on the now infamous “Freedom Convoy 2022.” Freeland stated, “If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen, the insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.” The announcement […]
by Daniel Lacalle via Mises.org For the past two years, governments in the European Union have engaged in contradictory actions by both suppressing economic growth through lockdowns and other covid-19 restrictions and simultaneously trying to “stimulate” their economies through monetary expansion by the European Central Bank. The results, not surprisingly, have fallen far short of […]
by Bas Spliet via Mises.org A little over one hundred years ago, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises started arguing that a socialist economy is impossible. In the turbulent years following the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia, Vladimir Lenin tragically proved him right in real time. Mises’s Argument In spite of all the pretenses of […]
by Jeff Deist via Mises.org Economics is about human action and choice within the context of scarcity. The problem facing economists is how to understand and explain human betterment, which is another way of saying production. The critical question, posed correctly by economist Per Bylund, starts with scarcity as the default point for understanding purposive […]
by H.A. Scott Trask via Mises.org As an American historian who knows something of economic law, having learned from the Austrians, I became intrigued with how the United States had remained prosperous, its economy still so dynamic and productive, given the serious and recurring economic fallacies to which our top leaders (political, corporate, academic) have […]
by Ryan McMaken via Mises.org In perhaps the most predictable column of the year, the Wall Street Journal this week featured a column by Walter Russell Mead declaring it’s “Time to Increase Defense Spending.” Using the Beijing Olympics and the potential Ukraine War to push for funneling ever more taxpayer dollars into military spending, Mead […]
by Robert Zumwalt via Mises.org It seems obvious that wherever vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and lockdowns have been imposed in response to covid-19, progressive political and media elites have been the driving forces behind them. This is clear to those of us alive today, but it is worth considering whether future history books will attempt to […]
Lee esto en Español by Michael Rectenwald via Mises.org In 2018, Ross Douthat of the New York Times introduced the phrase “woke capital.” Essentially, Douthat suggested that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic value for economic value. Under woke capitalism, corporations offer workers rhetorical placebos in lieu of costlier economic concessions, such as higher wages […]
by Murray N. Rothbard via Mises Institute [This excerpt from Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market is an explanation and elaboration of points first made in Ludwig von Mises’s Bureaucracy—and provides an excellent example of how Murray Rothbard’s treatise built on Mises’s to employ and extend the core analytical framework. The footnotes have […]
by Claude Frédéric Bastiat via Mises Institute A man (and the same thing may be said of a people) may procure the means of existence in two ways,—by creating them, or by stealing them. Each of these two great sources of acquisition presents a variety of methods. We may create the means of existence by […]
by Daniel Lacalle via Mises.org I was surprised to see a tweet from President Joe Biden showing the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States for 2021 compared to the average GDP growth under other presidents. The tweet stated, “This didn’t happen by accident. Because of the actions we took, last year we achieved the fastest […]
by José Niño via Mises.org “What starts here changes the world.” The University of Texas at Austin’s motto not only applies to the research university’s overall impact on world affairs, but also to the outsized role cultural and political developments within the United States have on the rest of the planet. Ever since it became […]