Mises Daily

Lately, the supporters of big government have deployed an interesting twist to their arguments, claiming that it is a dirty right-wing lie that government has grown under the Obama administration.

The 17th-century Dutch Protestant Hugo Grotius, deeply influenced by the late Spanish Scholastics, developed a theory of natural laws that he boldly declared was truly independent of the question of whether God had created them.

Diminished preparedness for severe weather events should surprise nobody. The airport industry is one of the most regulated and intervened-in sectors worldwide, and it is not uncommon for governments to own the airports outright, leasing or licensing the facilities out to favored operators.

Mencken wrote that the sine qua non of all good criticism should be its ability to stand alone as a piece of art regardless of the qualities inherent in the object of the criticism. Cantor, Cox, and the other critics whose essays appear in Literature and the Economics of Liberty attain this goal.

Our health and living standards have virtually nothing to do with charity and virtually everything to do with entrepreneurs solving problems. Had we depended on only alms and goodwill to elevate our living standards, we would still be squatting in mud huts.

Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention. Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic. We are judged incapable of setting up an adequate social defense against vicious rum-sellers and malefactors of great wealth.

Neoconservatives are trying to save the welfare-warfare state from what they see as its remediable excesses. They want the current system, but they want it fixed up and buttoned down: a state that will be strengthened because it's more modest and more efficient.

Burns's diary is page after page of political dirty dealing, lying, and backstabbing. Nixon went so far as to plant negative press about Burns and threatened to expand the Fed's Board of Governors to dilute the chairman's influence.

Paul Krugman took a macro forecast from Mark Zandi, and then after the fact compared it to the actual trajectory of GDP. Krugman concluded that Keynesian theory was vindicated, when in fact the results are more in line with what the critics predicted would happen.

As a developer, I do not hire an employee before I have conceived of a construction activity that will earn me a decent return. I hire an employee when I have a productive need for his services.