Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement. Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of...

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Save the date!  Join us for our 2023 Supporters Summit, October 12–14, at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.  Lew Rockwell and Jeff Deist will host a weekend filled with engaging discussion and social time with other Mises members and speakers. We'll open Thursday evening, October 12 with a reception in Auburn. Friday, October 13, we'll have discussions and lunch at the Institute and close with a dinner at the new and unique Botanic in...

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Nobel Prize–winning economist George Stigler once wrote of economists as preachers, which he described as involving offering “a clear and reasoned recommendation (or, more often, denunciation) of a policy or form of behavior by men or societies of men,” particularly with respect to the ethics of market competition. With regard to defending those ethics (i.e., defending mutually voluntary arrangements that individuals make with one another versus...

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When advocates of secession in the United States bring up “national divorce,” a common objection we hear is that secession can’t be allowed because it would make some people worse off. For example, we’re told that if, say, a majority of Floridians voted to secede, that still can’t be allowed because there would still be a minority that opposes secession. We especially hear this in the context of so-called red states—where, presumably, a majority of...

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A student goes into a bank. He tells the personal loan banker, “I want to borrow $7,500 per year for the next four or five years.” “That’s at least $30,000 over time,” the banker says. “Personal loans have a 10 percent interest factor.” “For my loan,” says the student, “I need an interest rate close to a home mortgage, like 6 percent. Also, I don’t want to be charged interest for the first four or five years of the loan.” The banker asks, “How long...

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Advocates of Keynesian economics believe the Federal Reserve should pursue policies that will prevent the possible decline of the economy into a liquidity trap. But what is a liquidity trap? Economic activity often is presented in terms of a circular flow of money. Spending by one individual becomes part of the earnings of another individual, and spending by another individual becomes part of the first individual’s earnings. Recessions, by this...

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Every time the United States reaches its debt limit, we read that it is important to reach an agreement to lift it. The narrative is that the debt ceiling must be raised, or the US economy will suffer a severe contraction. There is even an episode of a TV series, “Designated Survivor”, where the character played by Kiefer Sutherland places lifting the debt ceiling as the priority to get the U.S. economy on track. The debt ceiling is viewed as an...

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After the recent midterm election, when it became apparent that Americans would have a divided new Congress, it wasn’t long before the word bipartisan started showing up as an adjective to modify a whole host of legislative proposals and discussions. While in many cases the word has been aspirational rather than descriptive—as in, “the other side should follow our lead in agreeing to this”—it has often also been used as a magic modifier in an...

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