Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Revisiting the legacies of colonialism to indict Western imperialism has become a fashionable pastime for leading academics. Many argue that colonialism erected permanent roadblocks to thwart the progress of ex-colonies. Western colonialism is so vilified that any attempt to present a balanced overview is deemed improper. Bruce Gilley’s controversial essay, “The Case for Colonialism,” spawned a firestorm of criticisms that led the journal, Third...

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Escape the summer heat for a cool weekend in the beautiful mountains of Banner Elk, NC. Tentative plans are to meet for dinner on Friday, July 21 at the Sugar Mountain Ski Resort. Guest speakers will be Franklin Sanders and his son, Justin, who will discuss their decades long effort to protect the precious metal trading industry from government intervention. Saturday, July 22 will begin with breakfast with the owners of Sugar Mountain while they...

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Join Mises Club Carolinas for their next meetup in Fort Mill, SC, on Saturday, April 22. We'll tour Southpoint Solutions, and industrial lighting company from Club Member Jared Wall. After the tour, we'll have dinner and discussion at Farmhaus Butcher and Beer Garden. The speaker will be a new Club Member, Trey Carson, owner of Happy Mining, a bitcoin mining company in central North Carolina.  For more information or to register for this event,...

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As you may have noticed, those dreaded “forces” seem to have rematerialized—in the headlines, in the journals, in the pages of bestsellers: those historical, material, political, or ideological forces that supposedly make conflict between some set of groups, classes, or states “inevitable.” But as the great libertarian historian Ralph Raico never tired of telling, such collectivist narratives are often little more than convenient scapegoats or...

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The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on March 10 was the second largest bank failure in US history. Just two days following SVB’s collapse, Signature Bank joined the record books as the third largest bank failure in US history. First Republic Bank also seemed on the edge of collapse until Bank of America, Citigroup, and other big banks agreed to jointly fund a bailout for it. Major Swiss bank Credit Suisse was also teetering on the brink when...

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Murray Newton Rothbard, perhaps the greatest enemy of the state in the second half of the twentieth century, would have recently celebrated his ninety-seventh birthday had he lived. Men are not salmon, those unique creatures that swim against the current. Most people “go with the flow” and allow the pace of events to dictate their lives, at least in that few consciously choose to reject the current order of things, declare it to be profoundly...

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A key principle in understanding Austrian economics is seeing the inefficiency of government spending. In an era of overbearing states and reckless fiscal policy, this principle must be emphasized repeatedly. Politicians might claim the best of intentions when dishing out funds for military defense, social welfare, and public works. Their civil servants might try to realize these plans efficiently and thriftily. However, the very nature of...

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