Global Economy

In the 1940s, Mises wrote on the trends that brought Europe to the abyss of war and destruction. These essays remained unpublished--until now.

The New Scientist tries its hand at economic theory, and makes an awful mess of it. Callahan and Murphy explain where the piece goes wrong. 

The foes of trade are missing an important effect of the rising volume of world commerce, says Hans Sennholz: the improvement of living conditions in all countries. 

It's true that the protestors at international trade meetings want nothing short of world-government regulations on labor and environment. They want global redistribution and antitrust. They want the UN to tax us and impose an international welfare state. And they hate anything-private property, corporations, national borders-that stands between them and their goal.

Two camps are arguing about development economics. Both are wrong, says Christopher Coyne. 

Mancur Olson's new book resolves for me a major mystery. As all readers of The Mises Review know, socialism is an unworkable system. Mises conclusively demonstrated that a centrally planned economy cannot calculate rationally; 

Until a few months ago, the sum of my experience with Latin America had been a few trips to border cities like Juarez, Nogales, and Tijuana. Beyond that, I had to depend upon Dan Rather, the New York Times, and various social activist groups to find out what was true about life South of the Border. All had a sad story to tell.

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith assailed American spending patterns. Consumers, he told us in The Affluent Society, spend too much on such fripperies as large tailfins on cars.

The left, most recently New York politico Lenora Fulani, likes to render the Boston Tea Party as a protest against corporate capitalism, and thereby analogous to the property-destroying protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. A more traditional interpretation regards the Boston Tea Party as simply a revolt against taxed tea, so perhaps the WTO, which purports to support tariff reductions, fulfills the promise of the Tea Party.

The city of Seattle, which had planned to make money on hosting the World Trade Organization, wound up trying to cut its losses by asking the WTO to end its conference early and leave town. Self-described free-traders who helped to create the WTO ought to be feeling the same way. The organization that writes the rules of world trade is now the focus of nearly every unionist, environmentalist, and capitalist-hating pressure group in the world.