As documented by Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan , the state uses any crisis, even those it brought about itself, to enhance its power. Economic crises are no different in that respect: The Great Depression ushered in a vast new array of government powers and programs, and the inflation of the early 1970s led to a brief flirtation with
Recent swings in the oil price remind us how market prices respond to changes in supply. Traders are constantly speculating how this or that political event, whether in Venezuela or the Middle East, will affect resource availability. The social function of such price swings is to eliminate shortages and surpluses. As Martha Stewart would say,
[Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Economics for Real People , available through Mises.org and Amazon.com .] [Economics] is universally valid and absolutely and plainly human. —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action When we first approach a science we want to know, “What does it study?” Another way of approaching the same issue is to ask, “What basic assumptions
You have left your house for a walk. You intend to pass through some woods on your way to town to meet a friend. After about 25 minutes of walking, however, you stop, puzzled. The trail through the woods should have put you in town several minutes ago. What happened? Suddenly, you remember the fork in the trail by the big chestnut tree. You always
Special-interest-group pleading often tries to hide behind supposedly economic arguments. It is important to debunk such arguments as they arise, so that the interest-group politics can be seen for what it is. So, in the spirit of Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms , I offer the following. There Is a Shortage of Programmers. Many advocates of government
>Many large brokerage houses, as well as small boutiques, rely heavily upon mathematical models in their day-to-day trading. Clearly, there is a market for this kind of modeling, yet Austrian economists have generally held the view that the neoclassical, mathematical approach to economics is a strictly limited approach. How can we reconcile the
Choice is choice between alternatives, and these alternatives must be distinguishable or they are not alternatives; moreover, one must in some way present itself as more attractive than the other, or it cannot be chosen. -- R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature , p. 41 Bryan Caplan, in his widely circulated web article, “ Why I Am Not an Austrian
Click Here to view the online video version of this lecture in WMV format. Human interactions can be located on an axis running between two polar ideas, persuasion and aggression. I am not contending that this is the only way we can evaluate human action, only that it is a useful way. What do I mean by persuasion? Basically, this: When engaging
Some freedom-minded people pin their hope for liberty on withdrawing from an unfree world. In times of crisis, such as wars and recessions, this idea gains popularity. We might refer to this notion as “economic secession,” borrowing the name from John Kennedy’s article of the same title . Despairing of advancing the cause of liberty in society at
The starting point of praxeology is not a choice of axioms and a decision about methods of procedure, but reflection about the essence of action. — Ludwig von Mises, Human Action , II.3 Several times recently, I have found myself engaged, directly or indirectly, in discussions about exactly what implications follow from the fact that humans act.
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.