The opponents of technological innovation in free markets have been with us for a long time. A century ago, Gustave de Molinari was defending the automobile from the technology haters of his day. Little has changed since then.
The Middle East once enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity, but thanks to centuries of bureaucratic centralization and institutional barriers to free-market growth, the modern Middle East has long since fallen behind the West.
Natural rights are fundamentally different from goods and services. Judge Napolitano explains in his new book how the acquisition of a mere service — security — cannot be based on the destruction of rights, which cannot be traded away.
If all work and all workers were homogenous, we might be able to say that the gender wage gap is caused by sexism, but the gap is better explained by big differences in the life goals and chosen industries of men and women.
We're now in the world of negative interest rates, and Mises’s insights about human action are the key to understanding the implications of this, and in understanding the impossibility of a negative “natural” or “originary” interest rate.
Data from Japan, Spain, Greece, and the Netherlands all suggest that deflation is not the disaster many economists suggest it is. In fact, there's good reason to believe that economies really start to take off when prices fall the most.
Jonathan Newman reports from this year's Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute. As usual, this year's conference brought together some of the finest Austrian-school faculty and students from around the globe.
It's much easier to calculate the direct cost of a tax than the many indirect costs of a government regulation. Nevertheless, government regulations remain some of the biggest millstones around the neck of human progress and ingenuity.
