Spoken Mises

There is a Japanese custom naming great achievers as living national treasures. In an article from 1986, Lew Rockwell wrote that there were three then living: Henry Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt, and Murray N. Rothbard. To most Americans, economists don't leap instantly to mind as treasures, let alone national treasures. Whether making arrogant and fallacious mathematical predictions, filling the minds of college students with the wrong-headed Keynesian and socialist ideas, or giving a theoretical cover to state inflation, taxation, regulation, and spending — the typical economist is not a friend of liberty.

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Three National Treasures (4.76 MB)

Hardly a day goes by without someone's proposing how to make the bad situation in subprime mortgage lending even worse, writes Steve Berger. Legislators at all levels of government are contending for ownership of the most destructive idea. Finalists in this legislative race to the bottom include punitively stiff lending standards, foreclosure holidays and taxpayer-financed bailouts. He proposes a far simpler, fairer and effective course of action: let free people sort it out for themselves.

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The Subprime Mortgage "Crisis" Will Fix Itself (1.18 MB)

War imagery may be the most commonly abused analogy in politics, writes Gary Galles. War imagery is invoked to show determination to win. But as Senator Reid and others assert with regard to Iraq, shooting wars have no winners; just those who lose more and those who lose less as casualties mount. However, the casualties caused are the last thing social "war on X" supporters ever discuss, although any honest evaluation would find many casualties, as with large public housing projects which became "instant slums" or the litany of failed training programs promoted as part of the War on Poverty. Then there's the War on Drugs...

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Abandon All Unwinnable Wars (792.00 KB)

David Evans writes: "I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!"

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I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train (1.73 MB)

The story of Tulipmania, writes Doug French, is not only about tulips and their price movements, and certainly studying the "fundamentals of the tulip market" does not explain the occurrence of this speculative bubble. The price of tulips only served as a manifestation of the end result of a government policy that expanded the quantity of money and thus fostered an environment for speculation and malinvestment. This scenario has been played out over and over throughout history. But what made this episode unique was that the government policy did not expand the supply of money through fractional reserve banking which is the modern tool. Actually, it was quite the opposite.

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The Truth About Tulipmania (8.02 MB)

On Wednesday the House passed a bill that would make price gouging by oil and gas companies a federal crime. The legislation called for jail time and fines of up to $150 million a day for charging "unconscionably excessive prices" and taking "unfair advantage" of consumers. Robert Murphy, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, argues that this proposed legislation is horrendous and would do nothing to help the American motorist. The most obvious difficulty is the arbitrariness of the "crime."

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The Giant Gas-Gouging Gaffe (1.49 MB)

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Property, and all else follows from that (2.40 MB)

As we drive along the large highways through a city, writes Brad Edmonds, it is all too easy to wave one's hand and say: "look at all these unseemly strip malls that make this place look like every other!" But if we are looking for a hardware store, need a cup of coffee, or need some engine repair, our tune changes: we are grateful that we can easily spot the Home Depot, the Starbucks, or the Buick dealer. The locale saves search costs, for which we are glad indeed, and we demonstrate this feeling by voting for them with our own money. That's why they appear. That's why they stay.

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In Defense of Strip Malls (1.56 MB)

Environmentalism is the diametric opposite of economic liberalism, writes George Reisman. In contrast to liberalism and its doctrine of the harmony of the rightly understood self-interests of all men, environmentalism alleges the most profound conflict of interests among people. It implies that there is a major economic benefit to be obtained through the death of billions of fellow human beings, that, indeed, the well-being and prosperity of the survivors depends on the extermination of those billions.

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The Arithmetic of Environmentalist Devastation (2.13 MB)

By suggesting that Americans look at their own government's actions, Rep. Paul took a shot at one of the nation's biggest sacred cows: we can do whatever we want in the world without consequence. For decades that seemed to be true, writes Doug Bandow. But no longer. It is critical that we honestly and realistically assess the consequences of US foreign policy. The first step to design good policy is to recognize the consequences — all of them, including the ugly, unexpected, and painful ones — of alternative strategies.

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War Without Consequence? Absurd. (2.20 MB)