Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Dorothy and her companions in the movie The Wizard of Oz feared lions and tigers and bears as they journeyed through the woods to visit the wizard. But real people living today might fear frighteningly large numbers more than large wild animals. We live today with some very large numbers that contain many zeros and commas, figures so large that the human brain can barely comprehend them. With so many zeros to count, it is often easier to express...

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Many economists believe that inflationary expectations cause general increases in prices. For instance, if there is a sharp increase in oil prices, people will form higher inflationary expectations that set in motion general increases in the prices of other goods and services. According to the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, “Undoubtedly, the state of inflation expectations greatly influences actual inflation and thus the central...

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Are the chickens coming home to roost for the US Treasury? As Ryan McMaken noted in a recent Mises Wire article, the United States is in a debt spiral and there’s no easy way out. The problem is multifaceted, but the origin is profligate government spending. While it typically spikes during crises, spending is increasing at an alarming rate even outside of crisis periods. And tax revenues are not keeping up, which means ever-deepening deficits....

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The traditionalist author Álvaro d’Ors emphasized in his work that the political thought of Rome was essentially stateless as it had a personalistic character. In contrast, Greek political thought had a territorial focus, giving rise to the idea of the state. Intellectuals who created and legitimized the idea of the state in modernity drew from Greek political thought. To abolish the state, we need to investigate what both the Greeks and Romans...

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the problems with Joe Manchin’s argument that Congress needs to reject the “extremism” in its ranks if it’s ever going to solve the many problems facing Americans. I argued that the opposite is true. That Congress is almost entirely unified behind a specific pace of progressive interventionism where the predictable consequences of previous interventions are perpetually used to justify more intervention. In this cycle,...

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November 28 marks the 1894 birth of one of American history’s most prolific public intellectuals—Henry Hazlitt. According to Llewellyn Rockwell, Hazlitt “was familiar with the work of every important thinker in nearly every field” and “wrote in every important public forum of his day.” His published work as a journalist, literary critic, philosopher, and economist ran to roughly ten million words before his death in 1993, including perhaps the most...

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