6b.) P: Mises.org 2016-02-18 21:22:45

2024-02-15

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most common measure of national wealth and economic growth. Yet the layman—and even many businessmen and economists—is taken aback when mainstream commentators and professionals get very excited about changes to GDP, which seem to have little to no impact on real economic conditions.

2024-02-14

The new year started out on a painful note for autoworkers building electric vehicles (EVs). In the last month, thousands of workers have been laid off from General Motors (GM) and Ford plants in Michigan.
Most workers involved were, or were slated to be, working on electric versions of each brand’s signature trucks—the Chevy Silverado EV and Ford F-150 Lightning. The latter has been available for purchase since 2022, with the Silverado EV set to debut this year. Yet both have run into a problem: consumers don’t want them.
More specifically, consumers don’t want as many of these trucks as Ford and GM are currently producing. On its face, this might appear like a classic case of entrepreneurial error. But there’s more to the story because the production level of EVs, in recent years, has

2023-11-20

Regardless of one’s opinion on Israel and Palestine, people can agree that killing innocent civilians, wherever they’re from, is horrible, and whoever takes hostages for bargaining chips in negotiations is a horrific human being.
Such is the case of the ongoing siege of Gaza. One has to wonder why Hamas decided that the best course of action was to commit atrocities and kidnap civilians, only to elicit a response amounting to war crimes against Gaza, where most of the people didn’t approve of their actions. While Hamas is starting to realize what they did might contribute to the end of Gaza as we know it, some people disagree and argue that what happened in Southern Israel was justified.
Of course, I’m talking about the next generation of scholars, doctors, and engineers from

2023-11-16

Throughout my life, a specter developed by the state has been used to haunt and cajole the world’s politics to favor centralized technocracy. I remember it first being called “global warming,” complete with apocalyptic prognostications meant to occur by specific years. Sometime after those predictions failed to materialize, it was rebranded as “climate change,” and the technocratic class’s predictions became more ethereal and vague.
The craze made its way into the discipline of economics, where mainstream theories of externalities are used to justify state intervention into the lives of their subjects under the guise of solving climate change. Despite their aspirations to be forward-thinking and progressive, medieval thinking would be preferable to the reasoning used by technocrats and