Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Trying to keep up with economic news is exhausting. Tune into the financial news channels or scroll through any number of economic blogs, and you’ll be hit with a fire hose of alarming headlines, scary-looking graphs, and a tone-deaf establishment emphatically declaring that the economy is better than ever. Debates rage on social media and in the halls of Congress over the most trivial policy details. All while the financial markets swing...

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Before delving into the dangers of eliminating cash and mandating that all transactions be conducted by digital means, let us briefly discuss the legal aspects of money. In the United States, as in all economies that have legal tender laws, only cash is recognized as money. Some may think that the balance of their bank accounts is money too, but that is not quite the case. Your bank balance is one step removed from legal money. All banks must...

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Did someone recently flip a switch? It seems as though Wokeism, the Great Reset, ESG, DEI, and an assortment of other radical left-wing positions, have just taken over. It is in the movies, media, sports, finance, retail businesses, and even in the beer industry. Yet, it is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Wokeism is a part of the international Zeitgeist. For example, this past June, I inadvertently experienced a huge “Pride” parade (reported as...

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What contributes to the wealth of a nation? Gross national income (GNI) and gross domestic product (GDP) are two well-known measures of a country’s economic growth. One measures the earnings of a country, and the other measures the value of the final goods produced by the country. What drives these measures in the twenty-first century? We are now witnessing a pivotal technological divide among countries in their ability to invest in and deploy...

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[This article is the foreword to Stephan Kinsella's, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)] The question as to what is justice and what constitutes a just society is as old as philosophy itself. Indeed, it arises in everyday life even long before any systematic philosophizing is to begin. All throughout intellectual history, one prominent answer to this question has been to say that it is “might” that makes...

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For a number of reasons, the French Revolution is a kind of Rorschach Test for educated people. One cause of this phenomenon, if I may pile on metaphors, is clearly the blind man/elephant problem. There are so many parts of the Revolution, so many stages, so many protagonists, so many ideas, so many policies—often quite contradictory—that we are sometimes confused not only as to how to interpret it, but as to what part to interpret as well....

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The International Software Testing Qualifications Board provides an excellent preliminary definition of quality: “The degree to which a work product satisfies stated and implied needs of its stakeholders.” However, despite all its virtues, this definition still requires further clarification to fully grasp all of its business ramifications. Here is when the notion of value comes in handy. Value Is Subjective We learn from praxeology that...

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It’s a well-known fact at this point that in the United States and most of the so-called free countries that there is a robust surveillance state in place, collecting data on the entire populace. This has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by people like Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower who exposed that the NSA was conducting mass surveillance on US citizens and the world as a whole. The NSA used applications like...

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