The importance of Copernicus

On February 19th in the year 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Royal Prussia in the Kingdom of Poland. Despite dropping out of two university degree courses, he went on to become proficient in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and economics, and practiced for a time government and diplomacy.He is celebrated for his book "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), a book that created a...

For the Record

Good constitutional arguments can be made for and against President Trump’s evocation of emergency powers to address the crisis at our southern border.  But the notion that such a declaration would encourage a future Democratic president to do something similar borders on the comic.  Democrats don’t need encouragement. Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the...

Elizabeth Warren’s Universal Child-Care Proposal: The Starting Point For A Government Takeover Of The Sector

Senator Elizabeth Warren is right: Child care services in America can be extremely expensive. In certain areas, child care can be difficult to find at all. High prices have perniciously regressive effects on low-income families, causing them to miss job opportunities, use unlicensed relatives to care for their children or else forego high amounts of their hard-earned income. So the presidential candidate’s new promise of universal child care...

Modern Monetary Madness

More than 10 years ago some Australian readers begin regaling me with the ideas of economist Bill Mitchell of the University of Newcastle in New South Wales. He was teaching about something he called (and he coined the term) Modern Monetary Theory. I looked into it and fairly quickly dismissed it as silly. Actually printing money as an economic policy? Get serious. MMT is a revival of an early 1900s idea called chartalism. Now it is...

Which One Wins: Central Planning or Adaptive Networks?

The global economy is in the midst of a grand experiment pitting centralization (Central Planning) against the evolutionary model of adaptive, self-organizing networks. Centralization is the dominant dynamic of the Status Quo everywhere: the economies of China, Japan, Europe and the U.S. are all dominated by Central Planning: central banks, central state agencies, and Deep State / private sector nodes of wealth and power that pull the systemic...

Van Doren on Payday Loans

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently proposed the elimination of new payday lending rules created under the Obama Administration and imposed in 2017. Payday lenders are frequently vilified—a recent New York Times editorial declared that the CFPB “betrayed financially vulnerable Americans last week by proposing to gut rules…that shield borrowers from predatory loans”—but recent evidence indicates that the predatory costs of...

Another Deleted

Pasted below is another Cafe Hayek post – this one from November 2017 – the original of which I’m deleting because I’m being an excessively nice guy to C__ W__. An Open Letter to Cafe Hayek Commenter C___ W____by DON BOUDREAUX on NOVEMBER 11, 2017 in MYTHS AND FALLACIES, TRADE Mr. W___: You read on my blog that I’ll soon defend, in a debate in New York City, the proposition that Americans would be best served by a policy of free trade...

The Bob Murphy Show, ep. 17

My interview with Alex Tabarrok is up. A fun discussion between two economists geeking out.

Two hundred years of the liberty of the moderns

My new piece at Niskanen. Published on: February 19, 2019February 19, 2019Author: Jacob T. Levy

Government Road Management: Is There a Better Way?

Thousands of people are killed or seriously injured on Canadian roads and highways every year. Traffic congestion is common. Perpetual road construction/repairs. Cars lined up at a red light while non-existent cross traffic faces a green light. Idling cars, frayed nerves, road rage. If this was the performance record of private firms who owned and ...

Ludwig von Mises: Remembering a Fountainhead of Modern Libertarianism

Reprinted from Mises.org September 29 marks the birth of Ludwig von Mises, who Guido Hulsmann’s biography, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, argued was the 20th century’s foremost economist. Mario Rizzo credits him with “probably the most important single economic idea of the last century: rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism, and attempts to put such a system in place will only impoverish the citizenry.” Brian...

How Keynesian Central Banking Has Corrupted The Economic Narrative

Peter Schiff: We’d All Be Better Off if Cortez Was Still Waiting Tables Instead of Working in Congress

Peter Schiff recently appeared on InfoWars with Alex Jones to talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal. He said the real problem isn’t the climate deniers, it’s the economy deniers. Peter noted that we were in the great recession the last time retail sales came in as poorly as they did in December. He also mentioned the all-time high in auto loan delinquencies and the fact that restaurant sales are falling at the fastest pace...

America’s Socialist Revolution Has Begun

Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereignman.com On October 31, 1517, an obscure German theology professor put the finishing touches on a paper he had written about the current state of the Catholic Church, and sent it off to Archbishop Albert of Brandenberg for review. The professor’s letter was polite and professional, with a formal tone that one might find in a modern academic work. It could hardly be described as revolutionary. Yet within a...

What Trucking & Freight Just Said About the Goods-Based Economy in the US

Something has to give. Starting to be a fascinating phenomenon: Rates charged by trucking companies and other transportation providers continue to surge on a year-over-year basis even as the volume of shipments has dropped below where it had been a year ago, while the “capacity squeeze” of 2018 has disappeared, and as the price of fuel is down year-over-year. Freight shipment volume across all modes of transportation – truck, rail, air, and...

Ep. 1344 More Unknown History: People Weren’t Always Clueless About the Boom-Bust Cycle

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Who’d a-thunk it? The NYC minimum wage hike to $15 an hour is causing pain for many of the city’s restaurants? – Publications – AEI

AEI Who’d a-thunk it? The NYC minimum wage hike to $15 an hour is causing pain for many of the city’s restaurants? An article in the New York Eater (“Restaurateurs Are Scrambling to Cut Service and Raise Prices After Minimum Wage Hike“) highlights some of the suffering New York City’s full-service restaurants are experiencing following the December 31, 2018 hike in the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, which is 15.4% higher than the $13...

Necessity is the Mother of Invention – Retirees Desperate Reach for Yield

Ben Bernanke’s creativity inspired a generation of economists and central bankers. QE, ZIRP and NIRP established a new class of economics that is mathematically sound but practically disastrous. Billions of dollars were transferred from savers to investors to boost the economy, but the wizards of quant forgot that something has to give. In this case, it was the formation of a pension crisis that threatens the golden years of millions of...

Central Planning Is More than Just Friction, Report 17 February

It is easy to think of government interference into the economy like a kind of friction. If producers and traders were fully free, then they could improve our quality of life—with new technologies, better products, and lower prices—at a rate of X. But the more that the government does, the more it burdens them. So instead of X rate of progress, we get the same end result but 10% slower or 20% slower. Some would go so far as to say, “The free...

Off to London

|Peter Boettke| I leave for London tonight to participate in the Adam Smith Fellowship program next weekend. Before that starts I will talk at LSE, IEA and King’s. I will also spend a few days in the LSE archives.

Michael D. Farren on the Jim Bohannon Show

Michael D. Farren appears on the Jim Bohannon Show to discuss the Amazon exit from New York City.