In an emergency meeting yesterday, the Fed announced a new set of measures designed to combat the negative supply and demand shocks anticipated from COVID-19. The target for the benchmark federal funds rate (the rate at which commercial banks lend to each other) was cut to 0–0.25 percent and the discount window (the interest rate at which the Fed
Remember the Golden Age of Laissez-Faire, the grand epoch brought to a tragic end by the COVID-19 crisis, which laid bare its failures for all to see? Me neither. And yet the New Narrative is already being written. “ The Era of Small Government Is Over ,” writes Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times. US federal, state, and local government spending
Joe’s excellent critique of “state capacity libertarianism” picks up on something I also noticed when reading Tyler Cowen’s piece. As Joe puts it, Cowen’s ideal state is “a nonmarginal actor whose task is to achieve certain collective outcomes intuited by Cowen or some other political philosopher.” Cowen provides a laundry list of societal
In his magisterial Crisis and Leviathan , Robert Higgs shows that the growth of government in the twentieth century can largely be explained by patterns of crisis and response. These crises can be real (World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, stagflation) or imagined (inequality, the various isms). In either case new government programs,
Quick, what do Amazon, Gilead, and Netflix have in common? Obvious answer: they are getting valuable, even lifesaving, goods to people stuck in their homes; working hard to develop treatments and cures for the new strain of coronavirus; and helping relieve the tedium of government-enforced lockdowns. What a privilege to live in a mostly capitalist
No sooner had the COVID-19 recession hit the US economy—with its mandatory business and school closures, travel bans, shelter-in-place orders, and a massive drop in commercial activity—than politicians, academics, journalists, and business leaders began calling for the Fed to save it. The Fed’s response didn’t take long : a) $2.3 trillion in new
Oliver E. Williamson, 2009 Nobel laureate and founder of “transaction cost economics,” has died at age 87. As I wrote in 2009, Oliver Williamson’s Nobel Prize , shared with Elinor Ostrom, is great news for Austrians. Williamson’s pathbreaking analysis of how alternative organizational forms — markets, hierarchies, and hybrids, as he calls them —
There are two mainstream positions on Trump’s recent Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship and section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA): 1) the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)/ Techdirt liberal/libertarian view that Twitter, Facebook, etc. are private firms and can do what they want and 2) the Trump/Hawley/social
Nicolas Petit’s forthcoming book, Big Tech and the Digital Econom y (Oxford, 2020) offers an interesting new take on antirust and regulation in the digital economy. Here’s one wise reviewer: Introducing the concept of “moligopoly” Petit shows how firms with big market shares -- even so-called “entrenched monopolists” -- still face vigorous
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.