I am excited to announce our next major project here at the Mises Institute, the Lessons for the Young Economist video series. This will be designed for homeschoolers and young people. It will be something they will actually want to watch! And with the Mises Institute’s name on it, parents, grandparents, and educators will know they can trust the content.

The latest estimates reveal that nearly 2.7 million students have exited government public schools. These students’ families have rejected the state’s indoctrination and now they need solid instructional materials, especially in economics.

We have all heard the horrible and evil lies that kids have been taught in public schools. This series is the antidote.

Early in my university teaching career (which started in 1979), I noticed that the campus Marxists would essentially prey on the students they perceived to be the most gullible and easiest to manipulate. These predators included professors and various on-campus bureaucrats, and the predation began with the so-called freshman orientation. Freshman indoctrination would be more accurate. They would preach socialism to the students, never mentioning the realities and actual history of socialism but instead spinning tall tales of utopian nirvana.

One student told me that in his junior year of a liberal arts curriculum, he had been assigned The Communist Manifesto to read in four different classes. Capitalism was of course condemned as immoral and an enemy of ordinary people, and economics and economists were dismissed as tools of capitalism.

Some students arrived on campus open-minded and eager to learn about the world. But they were captured by the campus Marxists and turned into miniature versions of their perpetually angry leftist professors, who were political activists first and scholars a faint and distant second. You probably saw thousands of them on TV participating in the “antifascist” riots of the summer of 2020. Over the past twenty years, I have noticed that there is less and less need to indoctrinate the incoming freshmen; they have already been thoroughly indoctrinated by their K-12 education.

If you’re wondering why some opinion polls show that more than half of today’s college students claim to prefer the economic hell and impoverishment of socialism to economic freedom and capitalist prosperity—that they prefer omnipotent government to freedom—look to the last sixty years of intense socialist indoctrination at all levels of schooling.

This is the legacy of the “counterculture” of the 1960s, which was itself a product of the liberal educational bureaucracy. Indeed, in his day, Ludwig von Mises called universities “nurseries of socialism.” He added, however, that there has always been a remnant of students who question their professors’ advocacy of socialism and interventionism and educate themselves in economics and economic reality.

We at the Mises Institute are devoted to increasing the size and influence of this remnant. The Lessons for the Young Economist video series is aimed at homeschoolers—and indeed young people anywhere.

The project consists of a series of 15–20-minute videos inspired by Dr. Milton Friedman’s 1979 Free to Choose television series that aired on PBS. Directed by Dr. Jonathan Newman and based on Dr. Bob Murphy’s textbook, Lessons for the Young Economist, these short videos will consist of discussions and interviews shot in a relaxed classroom atmosphere.

Bob Murphy’s book has twenty-three chapters, and our plan is to produce a short video for each one. Each video will be free to all students, parents, grandparents, and everyone interested in learning about economics.

Economics education is essential if the next generation is to be saved from the clutches of the conniving commies on campuses, in the teachers’ unions, and throughout society. These videos will educate students in the economics and realities of economic freedom, socialism, and interventionism. They will teach them the economic way of thinking, which will benefit them for their entire lives and prevent them from being bamboozled into supporting the destruction of their own livelihoods.

There’s no organization better equipped to educate students and parents in economics than the Mises Institute. We know we can do this. Our Beginners video series (mises.org/begin) had over five million views just last year. We’re on to something big, and now is the time to keep our foot on the gas!

We need your help to fight this battle. Please join our effort to educate America’s youth in the economics of freedom by donating whatever you can to this important project. Thanks for your consideration.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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I frequently receive comments about the strength of the United States economy and the unfairness of perceiving things as less than stellar. Is it really the “strongest economy ever”? It’s evident that it’s far from being the “strongest economy ever.”

The United States unemployment rate has risen to 4.1%, the highest in three years, which is also significantly higher than the level seen in 2019. In June, a 70,000 increase in government jobs boosted payroll employment by 206,000. One-third of job creation is public sector jobs paid with more debt. Both the employment-to-population ratio and the labor force participation ratio are below the pre-pandemic level, and immigrants account for all the labor force growth since the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Ned Davis Research.

Inflation remains persistent and citizens have lost more than 24% of their purchasing power since 2019, with a 0.6% negative real wage growth in the January 2021–June 2024 period. Real wage growth in 2024 is rising only 0.8% year-on-year.

This shows why the United States Misery Index is rising to 7.4% in June from 6.8% in January. The Misery Index, which measures unemployment and inflation, bottomed out at 6.8% in 2023 and has been worsening since then. Furthermore, the index is far away from the pre-pandemic level of 5.4%.

All these measures allow us to understand why Americans are negative about the economy. Despite messages of redistribution, social policies, and equality, the average citizen is poorer, and only the wealthy have been able to improve their position and navigate high rates and inflation thanks to investments in the stock market. While this shouldn’t come as a surprise, it’s important to remember. There is nothing social about increasing debt, deficit spending, and taxes.

The problem for most Americans is that it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet despite record government spending, or because of its negative impact on inflation and taxes.

There is a reason why we should be worried about rising discontent and impoverishment. The placebo effect of government spending on GDP is declining. Real gross domestic income (GDI) increased by 1.3 percent in the first quarter, a downward revision of 0.2 percentage points from the previous estimate and a market slowdown. The average of real GDP and real GDI, a supplemental measure of U.S. economic activity that equally weights GDP and GDI, increased by 1.4 percent in the first quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

If we look forward, Americans are going to have to choose between two options: further impoverishment with Keynesian policies or making a dramatic pro-growth turn where policy is targeted at improving disposable income, increasing investment, and strengthening productivity and real economic growth.

We know that it will be impossible to cut the current deficit with tax hikes. There is no revenue measure that will generate two trillion U.S. dollars per year, and it is impossible to increase taxes further without punishing investment. The problem in the United States is mandatory spending, as the CBO expects outlays to reach 24.9% of GDP in 2036, while revenues will reach a record but insufficient 18%. If the Federal Reserve continues to monetize debt, Americans will suffer from the inflation impact as well as the rising cost of housing. The U.S. dollar’s purchasing power will continue to decline. However, it is easier to create two trillion U.S. dollars of productive GDI than to tax two additional trillion dollars per year out of the existing fiscal base.

Yes, the only solution for the United States is pro-growth, pro-business policies that defend the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. So-called social policies have only made everyone poorer and hurt the middle class.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

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