This interview with Walter Block is a little old (May 2013), but we haven’t linked to it before. Some highlights of the interview include: Block contrasts Austrian economists as philosophers compared to “ normative “ economists which he characterizes as ethicists and empiricists. He highlights praxeology, the study of human interactions, as a
Philipp Bagus and Andreas Marquart have co-authored a new introductory text on monetary policy for German-language readers. Here’s a brief description: In Warum anderen auf Ihre Kosten immer reicher werden - und welche Rolle Staat und Papiergield dabei spielen (transl. Why You Pay For Others to Get Richer - And What the Government and Paper Money
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. As 2013 draws to a close, let’s pause to recall some important developments for the cause of liberty – some of which you already know well, and others you’ll be hearing about for the first time. Edward Snowden . After sitting on the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping story for 18 months, the New York Times revealed a
[To complement Robert Murphy’s post today on economics and education:] From Human Action XXXVIII: by Ludwig von Mises In countries which are not harassed by struggles between various linguistic groups public education can work if it is limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic. With bright children it is even possible to add elementary notions
by Jacob Huebert Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and economist, hated Goodfellas . He especially hated the depiction of gangsters as “psychotic punks” whose violence was “random, gratuitous, pointless.” He preferred the Godfather films, where the gangsters never engaged in violence “for the Hell of it, or for random kicks,” but
Two items of note: 1. Ross Emmett’s EH.Net review of The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression by Angus Burgin (Harvard, 2012) , which focuses extensively on Hayek and the Mont Pèlerin Society. Ross calls it ”a subtle and nuanced history,” much better than recent similar books by Stedman Jones (2012) and Mirowski and
I attended this year’s ASSA conference in Philadelphia. The big story for most attendees was the weather, with a big winter storm leading to delayed and cancelled flights and trains, missed connections, and a slight damper on enthusiasm. It is a huge conference with several thousand participants and hundreds of sessions, panels, receptions, and
Dick Langlois points us to an interesting NBER paper on self-selection into government service , the results of which will surprise few readers of this blog: In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service. Importantly, we
Mark Thornton responds to former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger’s claim that the legalization of marijuana is a disaster. Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
I believe it was Alan Coddington who coined the term “hydraulic Keynesianism” to describe the typical macroeconomics textbooks of the 1950s, “conceiving the economy at the aggregate level in terms of disembodied and homogeneous flows.” The term also has a great visual quality, bringing forth an image of the economy as a giant machine with pumps
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.