In many ways, Canada has been surpassing the United States as a bastion of freedom in North America, with lower tax rates and an increasing trend towards deregulation of business. While this is all very wise, a recent idea dreamed
Archive for September, 2014
Will an ordinary German citizen challenge the lawless ECB?
From today’s Open Europe news summary: German economist Hans-Werner Sinn writes in the FT, “Deflation is not a danger for southern Europe, but an essential precondition for restoring competitiveness.” He describes the ECB’s latest asset purchase plan as “nothing less than
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Intellectuals and Over-Parenting
Like many upper middle-class 20-somethings, I am the product of what has been disparagingly termed “helicopter parenting”. Although cosseting, over-concerned parents have long been a trope in modern society, only in Generation Y has it become the norm. Helicopter parents,
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A Strategy for the Right Part 1
Reprinted from Mises.org What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms “old” and “new” inevitably get confusing, with a new “new” every few years, so let’s call it the “Original” Right, the right wing as it existed
More European “Growth” Shenanigans
Europe got some good news in early June as the EU changed its statistical guidelines on how to compute GDP. Among other changes, expenditures on prostitution and illicit drugs (hookers and blow, colloquially) will now be included. Of course, some
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Is New York City’s Proposed Ban on the Use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefits for Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Effective Policy?
In 2011, New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed a ban on using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (commonly known as food stamps) for the purchase of sugar-sweetened beverages. While the plan has been criticized by food and beverage
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The Ethics of Disease Control
As the threat of the ebola virus looms large and the Center for Disease Control issues what are undoubtedly hyperbolic projections of over a million casualties to the disease by January, we owe it to ourselves as libertarians to ask
About Those Monotonic Transformations…
If you have spent an egregious portion of your life in economics classrooms, you have doubtless heard that the utility functions used therein are representations of purely ordinal preference rankings. As your professors likely told you, although utility functions assign
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Ludwig von Mises: Defender of Capitalism
Editor note: Today commemorates the 133rd birthday of Ludwig von Mises. September 29, 2014 is the one-hundred-and-thirty-third anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Mises was my teacher and mentor
More Evidence That Canadian Success Story Didn’t Rely on Loose Money
In a previous post, I reviewed the great Canadian success story involving relatively large budget cuts as a way to turn around the fiscal crisis of 1995. On the surface, this seems anomalous to those who think Aggregate Demand is
Krugman vs. Krugman on Conservative Canadian Cockroach
You really have to feel bad for Paul Krugman. No matter how many times he tries to kill the idea that 1990s Canada serves as a lesson for today’s policymakers, it just keeps coming back, like a cockroach. In case you
New Taxes on the Way
The province of Ontario is a financial basket case. The provincial government pays nearly 10% of its tax revenue on interest to cover the $270bn. debt load (over $20,000 per Ontarian). To put this in perspective, the slow-motion train wreck
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Milton Friedman, 1912-2006
Reprinted from Mises.org Few American economists have wielded as much influence on economic thought and policy as the late Milton Friedman. He was an articulate and ardent advocate of free markets and personal liberty. In 1962, his Capitalism and Freedom, which
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Civil Society and Order
This past summer was anything but good for limited government supporters. We saw yet another killing of an unarmed black teenager by a white cop, followed by a military-style occupation by police of a suburban community. Parentless children along America’s
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The World´s Largest Subprime Debtor
Do you have a friend who consistently borrows 30% of his income each year, is currently in debt about six times his annual income, and wanted to take advantage of short-term interest rates so that he needs to renegotiate with
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A Letter to the City of Oshawa
Mr. Major and all Council members of the City of Oshawa 50 Centre Street South Oshawa, Ontario L1H3Z7 Dear Madams/Sirs: I would like to comment on the ban the city of Oshawa is considering on sale of puppies and kittens
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Gross Output Statistics and the ABCT
Austrian Business Cycle Theory has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 2008 financial crisis both in the popular press and in academia. It’s inconceivable that any regular consumer of political and financial media has avoided exposure to ABCT and other Austrian
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Forced Organ Donations
In his work A Critique of Interventionism, Ludwig von Mises concluded that an endless progression of interventions was the inevitable consequence of otherwise well-intentioned policy makers “In a private property order isolated intervention fails to achieve what its sponsors hoped
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Dependency and Farming
In his work Prejudices, H.L. Mencken wrote plenty of scathing criticisms about American social life. His arch-nemesis received the most scorn: the average farmer. The farmer, he wrote, is “a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the
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Germany takes a stand against Keynesian stimulus
Re: US urges EU to do more to stimulate its economy At the recent meeting of the G20 US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew led the majority of the industrial world’s finance ministers and central bankers to urge Europe to increase
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