Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

This article is a revised version of a talk given at the Oxford University Mises Society on January 16, 2024. The talk drew upon themes discussed in David Gordon and Wanjiru Njoya, Redressing Historical Injustice: Self-Ownership, Property Rights and Economic Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Supporters of free market capitalism are often thought, wrongly, to be unconcerned about human well-being. On the contrary, it is precisely because we are...

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As a frequent X/Twitter user, I follow a variety of accounts that touch on a number of niches: whether that is economics, finance, Catholicism, college football . . . or in this case, Lord of the Rings. A popular Twitter account that regularly shares content related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work broke from character to offer an insight on another tweet. In the tweet he refers to, a food inspector is shown interrupting the business of a diner, which the...

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Acronyms—LOL, PIN, ASAP, CAPTCHA, RADAR, LASAR, SCUBA, and others that combine the initial letters of other words, the whole being pronounced as a single word—have become part of the English language. Let’s coin another one: WAITT (no, that’s not a misspelling of WAIT), an acronym for “We’re All in This Together.” The five-word phrase itself appeared in the early weeks of the pandemic that began in early 2020. Although the pandemic has officially...

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For those who remember their high school textbooks, the issue of America's imperial history is very clear cut. American imperialism, the textbooks told us, was that fairly brief period in American history that lasted from 1898 to 1945. This was the period during which the United States acquired a number of overseas territories, including the Philippines and Puerto Rico, among others. The era of imperialism, we are told, ended in 1945 when the...

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Socialist Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” describes the slow and gradual intellectual capture of a society through its influential and powerful institutions, including the church, media, the arts, corporations, schools, and universities, eventually leading to full infiltration. It takes little awareness to realize that these strategies have succeeded. In the United States, all of Gramsci’s institutions are now socialist in...

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Socialism: A Logical IntroductionScott R. SehonOxford University Press, 2024; 268 pp. This is a better book than I expected it to be, but it is not without its problems. Scott Sehon, a philosophy professor at Bowdoin College, is strongly inclined to believe that socialism is better than capitalism, but in the book, his main aim is to set forward some of the main arguments in favor of each system, indicating their strengths and weaknesses. He has an...

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Free markets is an unambiguous term, which implies a lack of inappropriate government intervention as consumers and firms pursue their own interest in a competitive environment. (my emphasis) —Clifford Winston, “This Economist Really Loves Free Markets”   Inappropriate government intervention is a line government finds easy to cross, much like the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause. The latter was never intended to be a provision of infinite...

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Having recently completed forty-one years as a university economics professor I am convinced that books like Human Action in particular, and the Austrian School in general, are more needed than ever if Western civilization is to be saved from the onslaught by the current generation of “cultural” Marxist totalitarians. All socialists, Mises wrote in Socialism, are first and foremost “destructionists” who want to destroy the existing institutions of...

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