Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years. Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks. How did he do it? Easy: he cut a host of central government agency...

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There are many arguments against secession. Some of them are quite prudent, such as those that simply contend that national separation may not be a good idea at this time.  Many others are premised on the refusal to acknowledge the human right known as self-determination. This argument is wrong and immoral, and is nothing more than the traditional imperialist-colonialist argument repackaged for modern audiences.  Perhaps the worst...

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Christianity Today magazine, founded by Billy Graham, chose Christopher Watkin’s book, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, as one of its 2024 Book Awards and the book most likely “to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.” Other Christian organizations promote the book too. Nonreligious readers won’t care, but they need to keep in mind that most people won’t take a class or read a...

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In Freedom and the Law, Bruno Leoni argues that the main threat to liberty comes not from overweening officials but from the law that empowers them. As Murray Rothbard puts it, “The real and underlying menace to individual freedom is not the administrator but the legislative statute that makes the administrative ruling possible.” In that light, we can see that woke tyranny does not come from the self-important diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)...

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Students apply for a scholarship here. "Once in a great while, a book appears that both embodies and dramatically extends centuries of accumulated wisdom in a particular discipline, and, at the same time, radically challenges the intellectual and political consensus of the day. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises is such a book, and more: a comprehensive treatise on economic science that would lay the foundation for a massive shift in...

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The American bankruptcy show of the twenty-first century continues unabated with federal and state government spending. History reveals that some states have defaulted through not meeting a required bond payment, leaving the bondholders and that state’s taxpayers with a debt problem. Today, we might call a state government bond payment default a bankruptcy. Many bankruptcy filings today are governed by Chapters 7, 9, 11, and 13 of the United States...

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Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experimentby Allen C. GuelzoAlfred A. Knopf, 2024; 247 pp. Allen Guelzo has been carried away by Abraham Lincoln’s magniloquent rhetoric. Guelzo, a historian who has written a number of books about Lincoln, would like very much to believe that his hero was a champion of individual rights and economic freedom. Lincoln’s ideal for America was of a nation with a large number of small businesses,...

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Prices will always increase, some small banks will fail, and the Fed was asleep at the switch when the run on Silicon Valley Bank occurred. Fed chair Jerome Powell admitted those three things in response to Scott Pelley’s questions on 60 Minutes. “But the overall price level doesn’t come down. It will fluctuate. And some . . . goods and services will go up, others will go down. But overall, in aggregate, the price level doesn’t tend to go down...

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