Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

When Murray Rothbard established a realignment in libertarian thought, his standard was determined by sovereignty rather than bipartisanship. A right-wing populist platform might be the most popular campaign strategy in the last few years. Since Brexit, a trend has swept a wide range of the globe. The question remains what this political revolution should be called. If it were a daring step away from the establishment, spectators might be concerned...

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Frédéric Bastiat is justifiably famous among believers in liberty. His many classic contributions include The Law and his essays “Government” and “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen,” not to mention some of the best reductio ad absurdum arguments ever (such as “The Candlemakers’ Petition” and “The Negative Railway”) and more. Less well known are other essays, such as his election manifesto of 1846, which illustrated what a principled...

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According to modern portfolio theory (MPT), financial asset prices always fully reflect all available and relevant information, and any adjustment to new information is virtually instantaneous. Thus, asset prices respond only to the unexpected part of information since the expected portion is already embedded in prices. For example, if the central bank raises interest rates by 0.5 percent, and if market participants anticipated this action, asset...

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Last week, a video clip of Francis Fukuyama went viral. In the clip, the political scientist called freedom of speech and a marketplace of ideas “18th century notions that really have been belied (or shown to be false) by a lot of what’s happened in recent decades.” Fukuyama then reflects on how a censorship regime could be enacted in the United States. But the question then becomes, how do you actually regulate content that you think is noxious,...

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I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives...

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I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives...

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To achieve sustainability, the world needs stability. Yet two-thirds of countries are facing major economic, political, and social problems. Most of them are also experiencing ethnic or civil conflicts, mass migration and poverty crises. The question is whether the UN's sustainability agenda can succeed in the context of ongoing or simmering conflicts. Paradoxically, preventing wars and conflicts isn't one of the UN's seventeen sustainable...

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I. Antony C. Sutton (1925–2002) was a British economist and economic historian who taught at California State University, Los Angeles. Sutton was also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His work focused primarily on the financial and commercial cooperation between major United States banks and corporates (call it “Wall Street interests”) and foreign states that were openly hostile to America. In his book Wall Street...

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Weakness in the US economy continues to hide behind surging debt levels and government spending. As noted last month by Daniel LaCalle,  [A] large part of the growth in GDP came from bloated government spending financed with more debt and inventory revaluation, adding 0.8 and 1.4 percentage points to GDP growth. ... The increase in gross domestic product between the third quarter of 2022 and the same period of 2023 was a mere $414.3 billion,...

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