Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

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Henry Kissinger: War Criminal and Enemy of Mankind

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

Get ready to see George W. Bush, Michelle Obama, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton all mourn together at Kissinger's funeral as they hail one of the regime's most devoted apologists.  Original Article: Henry Kissinger: War Criminal and Enemy of Mankind

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The Anatomy of the Statist

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

Statists reveal their belief in the almighty state in many different ways, but they all want the same outcome: more government control over our lives. Original Article: The Anatomy of the Statist

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President Biden Is Wrong. Military Spending Does Not Produce Wealth

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

In his latest defense of bloated military spending, President Joe Biden claims that the military budget creates real wealth. Instead, military spending is destroying it. Original Article: President Biden Is Wrong. Military Spending Does Not Produce Wealth

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How the Free Market Drove History’s “Great Enrichment”

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economicsby Deirdre Nansen McCloskeyUniversity of Chicago Press, 2022; 222 pp. Deirdre McCloskey is a great economic historian, and in Beyond Positivism, she makes a number of valuable points that draw from her immense learning in this field. I’d like to concentrate on a few of these insights in this week’s column. She stresses the importance of the “Great Enrichment,” the process by which...

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The Immorality of Protectionism

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

Protectionists are no better than any run-of-the-mill Progressive who wants more taxes on one group in order to subsidize some other group. There's no moral high ground here for the protectionists, just unfounded self-righteousness. Original Article: The Immorality of Protectionism

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Government Prohibitions on Raw Milk Are Ignorant and Dangerous

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

“Salus populi suprema lex.” The health of the people is the supreme law. As ruling ideals go, this is a good one. Unfortunately, the governing class in America decided long ago that raw milk—one of nature’s most perfectly nutritious substances—must be regulated and prohibited to the point of making it nearly impossible to obtain. In its place, they teamed with the dairy industry to promote pasteurized milk, a lifeless liquid so devoid of the...

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The Evil of the Residential Property Tax

2023-12-22

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2023-12-22

According to the Case-Shiller index, home prices have increased 44 percent since February 2020. That's just an average, of course, and some markets have seen increases in prices that are far higher. Even in middle-American housing markets, however—where home prices are supposedly more reasonable than on the coasts—prices have soared. In Cleveland, for example, the index is up 40 percent since early 2020. During the same period, the index rose 50...

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Conservatives Shouldn’t Assume the Supreme Court Will Save Trump

2023-12-21

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2023-12-21

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to ban — for now — Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot is the latest escalation in the broader theatre of deteriorating political norms in America. The four-three decision is grounded in the Court’s opinion that Trump’s actions on January 6 represent culpability in an attempted “insurrection” and therefore disqualify him under the Fourteenth Amendment. The response to the court’s...

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The First Enemies of Free Markets Were Conservatives, Not Socialists

2023-12-21

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2023-12-21

British conservative critics of industrialization invented new terms like "wage slavery," "factory slavery," and "white slavery." Much of the conservatives' terminology and their arguments would later be adopted by socialists.  Original Article: The First Enemies of Free Markets Were Conservatives, Not Socialists

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Let them Merge: Foreign Acquisition of US Steel

2023-12-21

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2023-12-21

Economic nationalists are once again fawning over Democratic US senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania. First it was for his opposition to Chinese-owned US farmland. Now he is opposing the acquisition of United States Steel Corporation (US Steel) by a Japanese company. This acquisition, however, should not be blocked. It should be embraced. The justifications for government intervention are not convincing. News broke Monday, December 18, that...

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Does Anyone Know What the Fed Is Doing?

2023-12-21

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2023-12-21

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop are joined by Mark Thornton to discuss Jerome Powell's most recent announcement. As the Fed signals its potential for a policy pivot, other members of the FOMC are sending other signals. What does this mean for monetary policy, the dollar, and the performance of the real economy? Thornton is here to answer these questions and more. "Will Powell's Pivot Bail Out...

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The Fed-Enabled Apartment Bubble Is Unraveling

2023-12-21

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2023-12-21

Thanks to Federal Reserve intervention, apartments and apartment buildings have turned into giant malinvestments. Once again, a federal entity intervenes in markets presumably to make them work better, but things end in a crisis. Original Article: The Fed-Enabled Apartment Bubble Is Unraveling

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Do Destroyed Monuments Represent a Past Not Worth Defending?

2023-12-21

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2023-12-21

The wonderful thing about liberty, property rights, and markets is that if you don’t like something, you don’t have to be a part of it. Under pure and beautiful capitalism, consumers are sovereign: they’re not forced to consume something, and their value creation isn’t expropriated to finance what someone else thinks is important. A liberal order based on individual property rights thus becomes a conflict-minimizing system in that we can leave one...

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Virtual Mises University 2024

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

Join 2024's Virtual Mises University for only $45—or join free for Mises Institute Members (use your promo code on the back of your Membership card).  For almost thirty years, Mises Institute scholars have presented at Mises University, a world-class, week-long, intensive event in Austrian Economics. Virtual Mises University is the online component of this seminar for students, professionals, business people, and absolutely anyone, anywhere, who is...

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Rothbard and Mises vs. Calhoun on the Natural Right to Secede

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

There are many reasons to support the breaking up states into smaller pieces. This is done via secession, and acts of secession produce smaller states. All else being equal, smaller states tend to be richer and they tend to have lower taxes. They tend to exercise less power over the resident population—because it's easier for people to escape smaller states than larger ones. Moreover, setting these tangible and practical considerations aside,...

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Our Friend the State

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequalityby Angus DeatonPrinceton University Press, 2023; xiii + 273 pp. Economics in America disappointed me, but I have only myself to blame. As you would expect from a Nobel laureate, Angus Deaton is very smart and erudite, but what you might not expect is that he is funny as well. The book contains much good sense, but it is quite unsympathetic to the free market. And this is...

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What, Me Normative?

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold Warby Branko MilanovicHarvard Univerity Press, 2023; 359 pp. Branko Milanovic’s Visions of Inequality contains one of the most misleading statements I have ever encountered by an author about the contents of his own book. Milanovic, an eminent economist who teaches at the City University of New York and was formerly the lead economist at the World Bank, addresses in this book...

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Selections from The End of the Dollar Era

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

Government-Managed Digital Currency: A Further Threat to Our Freedom by Paul Gottfried Whatever the modern self-described liberal democratic administrative state claims to be doing in the name of disadvantaged people is intended primarily and perhaps exclusively to increase government control. Further, whenever the same regime purports to be making our lives more comfortable, more agreeable, we may assume that our freedom and property rights are...

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Friedman versus Rothbard

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman didn’t only disagree on the subject of economics. They also sharply disagreed on the direction American conservatism needed to go. Original Article: Friedman versus Rothbard

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The Wrong Way and the Right Way to Fix the Fed

2023-12-20

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2023-12-20

Monetary Policy as Inflationism Today all governments and central banks operate under the ideology of inflationism. The underlying principle of inflationism is that the quantity and purchasing power of money determined by the free market leads to deflation, recession, and unemployment in the economy. The inflationist ideology is therefore embedded in the very concept of monetary policy, which can be defined as an increase in the supply of money...

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