markets

The number one problem of all public debate about politics and economics is the failure to name the state. If this would change, so would public opinion.

In the middle of July 2018, President Donald Trump said in an interview that he was “not happy” with the Federal Reserve nudging up interest rates and threatening economic growth in the United States

Numerous misunderstanding and mythologies surround the meaning of capitalism and competition, but few match the confusions over the meaning and relevance of “monopoly” in the workings of the market economy.

Several major central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve in the United States, have set a goal of two percent price inflation. The problem is, what central bankers are targeting is a phantom that does not exist.

Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The market has boomed thanks to confidence in a stable presidency. Illegitimate attempts to destabilize the office can lead to collapse.

The world is threatened with a renewed wave of anti-capitalism and anti-business sentiments and policies. Many who cheered the demise of Soviet communism in the early 1990s, presumed that this meant that, by default, the case for free markets and competitive enterprise had won in the battle of ideas. Over the last twenty-five years it has become clear that the same misguided arguments against free market capitalism constantly reemerge, like an ideological vampire waiting to rise from the intellectual grave and drain market freedom of its lifeblood by more government regulations and controls.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Shikha Dalmia, a Senior Analyst with the Reason Foundation, joins Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News H. Sterling Burnett. Dalmia, a resident of Michigan, joins Burnett to discuss the Flint water crisis.

Nevada’s casinos and the state’s largest electricity supplier are locked in an escalating conflict, but the Nevada Legislature can turn the impasse into a victory for both parties if it will merely restore economic freedom to electricity markets.

In this edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Managing Editor of Enivronment and Climate News, H. Sterling Burnett speaks with Robert Michaels. Michaels is a professor of economics at California State University in Fullerton, and is an expert on energy markets, energy regulation and electric power deregulation.

After years of rising gasoline prices, people are puzzled by the recent drop that has a gallon of gas at levels not seen in nearly four years. Typically in times of Middle East unrest, prices at the pump spike, yet, despite the violence in Iraq and Syria, gallon of gas is now at a national average of $3.

Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1934, there appeared in English one of the most important books on money and inflation penned in the twentieth century, The Theory of Money and Creditby the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. Even eight decades later, it still offers the clearest analysis and understanding of booms and busts, inflations and depressions.

This morning the House Judiciary Committee will undertake the markup of the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. The Act would protect consumers from the increased costs in accessing and using the Internet by permanently extending the moratorium on Internet access taxes, and would prevent multiple and discriminatory taxation of Internet sales.