Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Yearning for Beauty in the Truth of Economic Thinking We as a human race have a natural desire for beauty, and we as academics have a tendency to get lost in the weeds and forget this. Mises Institute president Jeff Deist has articulated this better than perhaps anyone before him in a speech (“We Need Truth and Beauty”) where he stated: We know Austrian economics is fundamentally true; in fact, truth is its most important and fundamental...

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If you watched the Fed Chair Jerome Powell testify before the senate and the House, you heard over and over that banks are well capitalized. The non-sequitur should inspire the Shakespearean quote “Methinks you protest too much.” The very next day after the hearings, shares of SVB Financial Group, parent of Silicon Valley Bank, fell 60 percent (and another 30 percent in afterhours trading at this writing) after a Wall Street Journal article...

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Economics in ActionBy Brian BalfourThales Press, 2022; 306 pp. “Public” high schools are for the most part rotten to the core, and it is widely recognized, if not quite “a truth universally acknowledged,” that they need to be replaced. But what should students in private schools or homeschooling programs be taught? If we wish to rescue our young people from the socialist and “woke” propaganda inflicted on them in government institutions, it is...

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Thus, the nearly half the adults in America who haven’t saved remain childlike and live in barbarism. For those who are saving, volatile markets point to a less-than-cozy retirement for the majority. Last year’s beat down of the average 401(k) plan was 20 percent, which didn’t help. But retirement participants are keeping the sunny-side up, believing “they’ll move closer to their retirement goal by ending 2023 with more in retirement savings than...

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The Censored Generation Incredulity. Astonishment. Disgust. Anger. It is these feelings—amongst others—that describe the general reaction to the revelations of the Twitter Files and other egregious episodes of Big Tech censorship of the electronic public square. The implicit deal with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. is very simple: we will look at your ads if you give us a service for free. The deal did not include censorship. But...

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As the State of the Union address and subsequent pronouncements have made clear, American politics is in the firm grip of fiscal illusion. One example is President Biden’s bragging that “In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion—the largest deficit reduction in American history,” which implied that we should only look at a short run effect which had little, if anything, to do with the policies he...

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Money supply growth fell again in January, falling even further into negative territory after turning negative in November 2022 for the first time in twenty-eight years. January's drop continues a steep downward trend from the unprecedented highs experienced during much of the past two years. Since April 2021, money supply growth has slowed quickly, and since November, we've been seeing the money supply contract for the first time since the 1990s....

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