The new head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, former Florida firefighter and state disaster coordinator Craig Fugate, says he hopes to steer his organization in a different direction. According to Amanda Ripley’s dispatch in the September issue of The Atlantic, Fugate wants FEMA’s role to be less paternalistic and more modest and collaborative:...
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Japan’s historic election Sunday gave the Democratic Party an overwhelming victory over the Liberal Democrats that have dominated Japan’s government for 55 years. The Liberal Democrats oversaw Japan’s industrial policy that supported Japan’s dominant firms during Japan’s rise as a major economic power during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Indeed, many American economists argued...
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In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Inglourious Basterds and the Problem of Revenge,” Jordana Horn incisively examines the theme of Quentin Tarantino’s new, fictional, revenge film, Inglourious Basterds, in which German soldiers and others in World War II are targeted by an elite Jewish-American commando unit to be killed, scalped, tortured,...
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President Obama announced that he will reappoint Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed), and I’m more than OK with the president’s decision. Bernanke’s policies over the past year and a half have put the Fed in a precarious position, but Bernanke says he has an...
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And according to Rasmussen, the number who “strongly disapprove” of the president’s performance has more than doubled since the inauguration. This can’t be pure partisanship or, as some mantain, “racism” at play, since such factors haven’t changed since January. All that’s changed is Obama’s had time to be president. Obama is losing support left,...
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In the midst of the health care debate, many on the left have dismissed arguments about the Democrats’ health care plan as hysterical paranoia, even dangerous hysterical paranoia. Not trusting the federal government has become so passé with the election of Obama and the focus on domestic policy. But I recall not one year...
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When American students learn about World War II, they are usually taught that it began on September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. They do not get much instruction about the Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Third German Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (after the...
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I recently read a book titled Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States, by C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson. It was originally published by Macmillan in March 1937, later became a hard-to-find, almost-forgotten book, and in 2007 was reissued by the Mises Institute in an inexpensive paperback...
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There was a certain horrifying fascination to observe the speed and enthusiasm with which conservatives embraced the unprecedented growth of government power and size under George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. A Crisis and Leviathan case study in the “ratchet-effect” of “crises” — documented brilliantly throughout by Bob Higgs and reprinted as...
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So you’ve been to a summer program sponsored by Mises, IHS, FEE, Cato, Independent, or any of a number of other organizations dedicated to economic research and education. You’re excited, and you’re firmly grounded in your understanding of the classical liberal tradition. You wonder: what now? Here are a few suggestions that will help...
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