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Harry Reid’s Olympic-Sized Fallacy

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid thinks that the U.S. Olympic Team’s uniforms—made in China as they were—deserve to be burned. He reasons that we have an abundance of unemployed textile workers in this country—why shouldn’t we take advantage of them to manufacture the Olympics uniforms? Wouldn’t that put these Americans back to work? There are…
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Africa Partnership Station

The Economic Kindness of In-Kind Donations

The popular humor website “Cracked.com” recently published a thought provoking article entitled “5 Popular Forms of Charity (That Aren’t Helping).”  The five charitable activities mentioned were (1) awareness campaigns, (2) donating clothing, (3) choosing your charity based on its overhead, (4) earmarking donations, (5) volunteering after disasters.  The author’s arguments for why each of these…
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Banknotes and fractional reserve

Economist Larry White at George Mason University submitted a thought-provoking written testimony the other day. Discussing the issue of fractional reserve banking before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, he made the following claim: For payment by account transfer, FRB offers a more economic way of providing payment services. A money warehouse…
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Krugman does not understand Austrian Economics

The title should be no surprise by now.  Paul Krugman–arch-Keynesian–is once again misrepresenting what Austrian economics is. Krugman thinks the recent financial crisis can test (and prove) the superiority of Keynes prescriptions for an ailing economy. Before we delve into the specifics, consider the alternatives Krugman proposes: classical economics (he considers Austrian among them) and…
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hollande

Why we need financial markets

“My true adversary in this battle,” he said “has no name, no face, no party… it is the world of finance.” Thus spoke new French President Francois Hollande while campaigning last month. Despite the seeming backwardness of such sentiments, it is no secret that many people actually do feel a degree of animosity toward the…
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Introducing Liberty Classroom!

With the introduction of Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom, you now have the opportunity to learn the history and economics that you never learned in school. Since the “intellectual battle for the free society is on,” Liberty Classroom‘s “goal is to equip as many ambassadors for liberty as possible with the knowledge that they need to…
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