Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

When the economy goes into a recession, most economic commentators believe that the government and the central bank should take steps to counter the rise in unemployment. Some economists believe that lowering unemployment can be achieved without any cost, given that the unemployed workers are idle. According to Paul Krugman, “If you put 100,000 Americans to work right now digging ditches, it is not as if you are taking those 100,000 workers away...

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In July 2021, the Watson Institute of Public Affairs at Brown University reported that since September 11, 2001, 7,057 US military personnel have been killed in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Civilian contractor deaths reached 8,000, although the institute admits this is an estimate considering many contractors were not US citizens, so some deaths went unreported. Finally, 30,177 US service members would commit suicide after...

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Our vacation airline tickets in September were funded by accumulated miles on our Alaska Airlines credit card. While on vacation this summer, my brother-in-law graciously hosted eight of us for dinner. He tried to downplay the generous hospitality by saying he had just gotten his “cash back” award from his credit card company. The “cash back” credit card had accumulated a tidy sum of money, paying for a very nice dinner. At home in Brookfield, a...

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As a frequent X/Twitter user, I follow a variety of accounts that touch on a number of niches: whether that is economics, finance, Catholicism, college football . . . or in this case, Lord of the Rings. A popular Twitter account that regularly shares content related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work broke from character to offer an insight on another tweet. In the tweet he refers to, a food inspector is shown interrupting the business of a diner, which the...

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Acronyms—LOL, PIN, ASAP, CAPTCHA, RADAR, LASAR, SCUBA, and others that combine the initial letters of other words, the whole being pronounced as a single word—have become part of the English language. Let’s coin another one: WAITT (no, that’s not a misspelling of WAIT), an acronym for “We’re All in This Together.” The five-word phrase itself appeared in the early weeks of the pandemic that began in early 2020. Although the pandemic has officially...

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This article is a revised version of a talk given at the Oxford University Mises Society on January 16, 2024. The talk drew upon themes discussed in David Gordon and Wanjiru Njoya, Redressing Historical Injustice: Self-Ownership, Property Rights and Economic Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Supporters of free market capitalism are often thought, wrongly, to be unconcerned about human well-being. On the contrary, it is precisely because we are...

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For those who remember their high school textbooks, the issue of America's imperial history is very clear cut. American imperialism, the textbooks told us, was that fairly brief period in American history that lasted from 1898 to 1945. This was the period during which the United States acquired a number of overseas territories, including the Philippines and Puerto Rico, among others. The era of imperialism, we are told, ended in 1945 when the...

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Socialist Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” describes the slow and gradual intellectual capture of a society through its influential and powerful institutions, including the church, media, the arts, corporations, schools, and universities, eventually leading to full infiltration. It takes little awareness to realize that these strategies have succeeded. In the United States, all of Gramsci’s institutions are now socialist in...

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