When someone makes the “roads” argument for the presence of government, they fail to point out that the final government product is substandard and often a hazard to people who use those roads. There is a better way.
Audio Mises Wire
Audio recordings of Mises Wire articles, offering contemporary news and opinion through the lens of Austrian economics and libertarian political economy.
While “wokeness” seems to be a new phenomenon, the problems are tied to a sixty-year-old “landmark” law: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This law, unfortunately, promotes government tyranny in the name of freedom.
New York City’s government has imposed draconian rent controls. The natural outcome, as economists note, has been massive shortages, as apartment owners no longer have an incentive to rent empty apartments.
While fears that AI will morph into something like the Terminator and try to destroy the world, the real threat from AI is that the authorities will use it to produce propaganda and public lies.
Artificial intelligence has much to contribute as a consumption good and a producer’s good. However, there also are limitations in what AI can do, given it susceptible to the GIGO rule: Garbage in, garbage out.
The right to be able to enter into contracts with others is fundamental to free markets and a free society. That means people should be able to engage in discrimination.
The “AI” in our present real-world hype is nothing like the sci-fi “creatures” of film; AI machines are nowhere near conscious beings.
The United States survived the first Great Depression, although it permanently changed the role of government. Will excessive government spending and money creation lead to Great Depression II?
Open-borders advocates often point to the alleged openness of borders between the individual states in the USA. However, a closer look shows there are many restrictions most Americans are unaware of.
In his State of the Union speech Thursday, President Biden will claim the economy is growing—and that his administration will “crack down” on corporate greed. He will not address the damage his administration has done to the economy.
Paul Krugman claims that the real factor determining inflation is the rate of unemployment, not increases in the supply of money. As usual, he is wrong.
It is during "emergencies" when we learn who really holds political power, and how ineffective are constitutional measures designed to limit the regime.
Few economists—even the free-market advocates—understand what caused the Great Depression. No, the Fed didn’t cause the Depression by failing to inflate the currency. Instead, it was the Fed’s inflation that led to the disastrous early events.
Many of the high-flying businesses that received massive publicity turned out to be the creation of a bubble economy. Not all businesses are flashes in a pan; many of them continue to serve as the backbone of our economy.
As Murray Rothbard has noted, there is an important distinction between nation and state. The former is a voluntary association of people while the latter is coercive and predatory. Progressives, of course, claim the opposite.
Governments in the US subsidize immigration through a bevy of welfare programs. The effect of subsidization is predictable: you get more of what you subsidize. This is true for student loans, ethanol, immigrants, and more.
Many economic think tanks espouse that national defense spending benefits Americans at large. It doesn’t. The notion that military spending "bolsters" the economy is yet another Keynesian fable.
Next month, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether New York regulatory authorities can target the NRA simply because of the organization’s political viewpoints.
Activist pro-immigration groups in Great Britain, while being heavily funded by government money, are using that money to stop orderly immigration and replace it with chaos. Taxpayers are not only on the hook to fund these groups, but also bear the brunt of immigration failures.
We may be governed by incompetent elites, but even they have not taken away our free will and ability to think for ourselves. We can look to Mises and Rothbard for inspiration.