Only half-kidding. “Another battered truck hauling what appears to be a dazzling fortune in gold bars was stopped at a routine U.S. Army checkpoint in Iraq on Wednesday, the third such cache of bullion seized in two weeks.”
Letters to Thomas Robert Malthus on Political Economy and Stagnation of Commerce by Jean Baptiste Say I know that certain corrupt and corrupting governments stand in need of monopolies and custom-duties, to pay for the vote of the honorable majorities who pretend to be the representatives of nations. I am not sufficiently unjust to desire that one
At the risk of committing the solecism of quoting myself (AEIOU, for those who understand!), in this context, I wrote in yesterday’s Capital Letter:- ‘We find it foolish to confuse falls in the price of certain selected items – especially those in temporary oversupply, or those subject to falling unit costs, such as station wagons and
More Fed Keynesianism from Vice-Chairman Roger Ferguson: ”In the quarters ahead and as noted at the conclusion of our policy meeting earlier this month, the Federal Reserve has to guard against further declines from the already low prevailing level of inflation. And we shall be on guard against such a development.... Indeed, given the existing
A good piece in ‘The Scotsman’, written by John Blundell of the Institute of Economic Affairs denouncing inheritance taxes as an assault on thrift and a spur to wasteful consumption, to the detriment of all.Positively Austrian in its message about ‘trivial’ expenditures http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/business.cfm?id=564292003 ‘We want wealth to fall
Virginina Postrel in the New York Times : When the price of toys falls because Chinese suppliers make them cheaply, or the price of computer chips falls because of new designs or the price of manicures falls because there is a nail salon on every corner, that is not deflation. These are changes in relative prices, not the overall price level...
I have spent much energy and not a little force trying to explain to the Macromancers that Greenspan’s ‘object’ productivity - even if correctly measured (which is a dubious proposition) - is not the same as ‘value’ productivity, which is the real purpose of the exercise. For example, 500 million miles of unlit fibre optic cable tells Uncle Al
Guess what? Deflation has its beneficiaries, too! Japanese salarymen don’t have to commute for hours on a crowded bullet train to the ‘burbs anymore - they can afford a swanky condo right in the city. “In the past everybody wanted to live in more fashionable and convenient downtown areas but it was too expensive,” said Takaya Endo, executive
We would do well to be suspicious of statistics on relative productivity, as compiled by that organ of One World Socialism, the ILO — with all its shibboleths about ‘rights’ to worker’s representation and ‘decent’ work, ‘fair’ wages, ‘gender gaps’ and all the rest of the leftist paraphernalia on display there. Though much has been made, on a
Just as in the US, another area which produces rich harvest of muddled thinking in the UK, too, is the whole vexed question of company pensions.We raise this because the papers here are filled with condemnation of the National Australia Group’s decision to close its defined benefits pension to new entrants at its main British subsidiaries,
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.