Ryan W. McMaken
Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in public policy and international relations from the University of Colorado. He was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
Ryan W. McMaken Articles
The August personal consumption expenditures price index, the Fed’s main inflation gauge, saw an increase of 3.4%, year over year. Meanwhile, the core PCE, excluding food and energy, rose by 3%.
The last time the Federal Reserve managed to hit its two-percent price-inflation target was March of 2021. At the time, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was telling everyone that price inflation was “transitory.” By the end of that year, however...
Shortly after becoming the new Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh has admitted that it’s been more than five years since the Federal Reserve hit its two-percent price-inflation target. Warsh has also claimed that he’ll change that, and he’ll bring...
As Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth demands a fifty-percent increase to the war budget—topping an eye watering $1.5 trillion—it may be instructive to remember that war spending has always and everywhere been the primary enemy of...
For most economists, the velocity of money circulation is an important factor in determining the prices of goods and services. If, for example, it was found that the quantity of money had increased by 10 percent in a given year, while the...
When the BLS released its May employment report earlier this month, one component of the report that raised concerns was the measure of average hourly earnings. In May, the year-over-year change for earnings was at the lowest level...
In the year since Donald Trump’s “liberation day” in April 2025—on which he began raising import taxes on Americans —1.2 million fewer Americans are now working, and inflation-adjusted hourly earnings are still below where they were in...
On April 15, Americans face the deadline for sending to the federal Internal Revenue Service a report on all their income. Most Americans do this because failure to do so is likely to result in fines and possibly imprisonment. If one...
The US Treasury Department last week released its monthly report on federal spending and revenue. March spending for the US federal government was up by more than $20 billion, or by nearly four percent, from March of last year. In spite of...
A central problem of political theory has long been the question of “who watches the watchers?” This stems from the fact that it is generally assumed that it is necessary to grant the civil government a monopoly on coercive power in order...
