Audio Mises Daily

Building the world's tallest building has been a matter of particularly bad timing by entrepreneurs. Even if they were able to successfully steal away enough tenants from the remaining pool of renters, the economic problem for society is that valuable resources are lost in the process of constructing buildings that are underutilized. However, it is not the entrepreneur's formula that is at fault, but a system-wide failure known as the business cycle, writes Mark Thornton.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by the author.

A debate has been raging for some time among those in the finance industry about whether the United States is currently experiencing inflation, deflation, stagflation, reflation, hyperinflation, or maybe even some other sort of "-flation" that only Dr. Seuss could imagine. Given the confusion, this article will add some color to the debate by offering usable definitions of the terms inflation and deflation and then attempt to show what is occurring in today's economy, writes Matthew Beller.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Ron Jennings.

Republicans used to talk about reducing the welfare state. I remember when candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980 promised to end the Energy and Education departments. Some Republicans, who themselves have caught the entitlement-spending/social-engineering bug, now propose the creation of a federal department of families.

Indeed many Republicans, who once said they were against the welfare state, now brag they are better at running the welfare state than the Democrats, writes Gregory Bresiger.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Ron Jennings.

At the outset of the American "experiment," the tax burden was light. Money was gold and silver. The definition of private property was clear and seemingly immutable, and the right to self-defense was sacrosanct. No standing army existed, and a firm commitment to free trade and a noninterventionist foreign policy appeared to be in place. Two hundred years later, matters have changed dramatically, writes Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Floy Lilley.

Reminiscent of a juvenile accepting a dare to do something stupid, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Christopher Dodd, crowed to reporters the other day that committee members had done what many thought would be impossible: the committee agreed to legislation that would rescue homeowners facing foreclosure. Not to disappoint the senator from Connecticut, but few of us ever doubted the ability of politicians to dilute the risks and rewards of voluntary exchange, writes Mark A. Pribonic.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Ron Jennings.

Albert Jay Nock wrote, "The only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?"

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Floy Lilley.

There will come a day that the world financiers will rush from dollars just as they have recently rushed into dollars, causing even worse chaos in the international financial markets. Without a stable monetary unit, the speculation will continue and worsen. Overreaction is now becoming more commonplace, but this is a predictable consequence of a world gone mad with fiat currencies, debt creation, and overspending. Massive debt liquidation will come, writes Ron Paul.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Floy Lilley.

The cliché "Third Way" has been used to define the so-called compromise between the conventional wisdom of the conservative and liberal firebrands. This nice-sounding compromise refers to the noisy rhetoric we hear not only in the US Congress but also in Britain, Germany, and other nations as well. The question, though, remains: Is there really anything new being offered? The demand for bipartisanship is nothing more than a continuation of the Third Way movement of the last several decades, writes Ron Paul.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Floy Lilley.

Chris Anderson, a well-known business guru in the world of online commerce, imagines a world in which all internet services are free. But he has made an error.

The reason some goods are given away for free in some markets has no relation to any hypothetical notion of "marginal costs tending to zero." In fact, those supposed free goods are "given" to us in exchange for our time and attention. As time is an increasingly scarce resource, its value is steadily rising, in terms of storage, processing, and bandwidth, writes Fernando Herrera-Gonzalez.

Let's pull this sentence out of the civic pieties of our time and see what's wrong with it: "We should all volunteer our time in charitable causes and give back to the community in a labor of love."

We can't argue with the instruction here, or the sentiment behind it. My argument is with the choice of language. It contains a word and three phrases the common usage of which can be highly misleading, writes Jeffrey A. Tucker.

This audio Mises Daily is narrated by the author.