Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

[This article is Chapter 9 of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.] When we hear of political movements in favor of decentralization and secession, the word “nationalist” is often used to describe them. We have seen the word used in both the Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, and in the case of Brexit. Often the term is intended to be pejorative. When used pejoratively—as by the critics of...

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It certainly isn’t common to find much agreement between the various authors here at the Mises Institute and our favorite metaphorical punching bag: Paul Krugman. But when it comes to the recently resurrected policy corpse of rent control, we have found a common cause. As Krugman noted back in 2000, The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and—among economists, anyway—one of the least controversial. In...

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Anyone following the news knows that after a bruising congressional hearing on antisemitism on elite college campuses knows that Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, recently lost their jobs. while the president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is under fire. While the issue is being framed as these presidents permitting (and sometimes encouraging) antisemitism on campus,...

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On New Year’s Eve, US Navy helicopters in the Red Sea engaged and sank three boats belonging to Yemen’s Houthis, killing ten. According to US Central Command, the boats were attacking a container ship and fired on the helicopters as they responded to the ship’s distress call. The encounter represents a significant escalation that risks forcing a whole new war on the American public and the Middle East. The Red Sea region has become one of the...

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Many years ago, in “The Communist Road to Self-Enslavement” (included in After the Open Society, a collection of Karl Popper’s papers edited by Jeremy Shearmur), I discovered the following sentence: “Like myself, [Ludwig von Mises] appreciated that there was some common ground, and he knew that I had accepted his most fundamental theorems and that I greatly admired him for these.” As I respect both Popper and Mises as great thinkers, although...

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I had the good fortune of attending the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) twice in succession, during the summers of 2020 and 2021. By that time, I was already quite familiar with the ideas of the Austrian School thanks to the many podcasts and recorded Mises University lectures, among much more, the Mises Institute has made freely available online. However, I likely never would have realized my own understanding of Ludwig von Mises’s economic works...

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While traveling recently, I was stuck in a terrible bout of traffic. Unbeknownst to me, West Virginia University’s fall graduation just ended, and I was caught in the middle of the seemingly endless stream of parents, relatives, and friends who were leaving the ceremony. To deal with this problem, the City of Morgantown closed down lanes and reserved them for exclusive use by graduation attendees. Though the city may have done a fine job handling...

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[This article is chapter 6 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Now available at Amazon and in the Mises Store.] During the early 1990s, as the world of the old Soviet Bloc was rapidly falling apart, the economist and historian Murray Rothbard saw it all for what it was: a trend of mass decentralization and secession unfolding before the world’s eyes. The old Warsaw Pact states of Poland,...

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