May 2021

Social democrats love to denounce low-tax, probusiness regimes as "neoliberal" and as places with more poverty. But the reality is that parts of Europe that embraced markets most reduced poverty while making their citizens richer.  Original Article: "These European Countries Beat

Steven B. Smith in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2021) gives us an excellent example of a fallacious way of arguing. Once we see how Smith, a Yale political science and philosophy professor who should

Some advocates of self-driving cars argue that their adoption would mean that very few people would actually own a vehicle anymore. We'd all just rent rides on self-driving Uber cars. This would be a dream come true for advocates of

An important impediment to understanding valuable insights economists have to offer is that they have trained people to ignore their pronouncements on efficiency. Economists’ common use of a standard of efficiency known as “potential compensation,” which is at odds with

Being a former academic myself, I have many unpleasant memories of endless debates over methodology. Among these topics is the question of how quantitative methods ought to be used in economics, and when it is appropriate (if ever) for use in

In this selection from chapter 19 of Reassessing the Presidency (newly available as an ebook from the Mises Store), Joseph Salerno examines one example of how the Federal Reserve and U.S. presidents work together to expand

Perhaps reporter Michelle Kosinski is unaware that the Trump-era secrecy she denounced flourished mightily thanks to the beloved Obama administration. Kosinski’s mindset also helps explain why Americans' trust in the media has collapsed. Original Article: "The Media Wants You to Trust

US senator Elizabeth Warren claimed last week that bitcoin uses too much electricity. In doing so, she makes a judgment about the "correct" amount of electricity use. But it raises the question of who is entitled to make such a judgment. It’s

Unfortunately, this oldest and most general result of the theory of social phenomena [viz., the spontaneous coordination of individual efforts] has never been given a title which would secure it an adequate and permanent place in our thinking. The limitations

This paper, I examine aspects of Orwell’s political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four. I focus on the novel as an exploration of the logic of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy or managerial enterprise, a concept