Editor’s Preface The World’s Toyshop From the Old Square Down Cherry Street Around St. Philip’s The Prospect at Newhall To Snow Hill Near the Birmingham Canal Pickard’s Steam Engines To Summer Row by Way of Lionel At the Red Lion In Thomason’s Manufactory This “missing chapter” is excerpted from an early draft of Professor Selgin’s new book, Good
Coin dealers and collectors are still reeling from the US Mint’s announcement that it had run out of American Eagle gold coins. But what ought to surprise every American isn’t that a government agency came up short. It’s that the US government should be making little metal discs at all. Coin shortages are nothing new. A few months before running
David Henderson and Jeff Hummel have managed to ruffle quite a few Austrian feathers with their recent Cato briefing paper, and no wonder: that paper claims not only that Alan Greenspan’s Fed was innocent of any role in encouraging the housing boom but that Greenspan had actually managed to do something Austrian monetary economists have long
Austrian economics emerged in rebellion against skepticism. The predominant economic doctrine in continental Europe at the time of its founding, that championed by the German historical school under Gustav Schmoller, rejected the idea of an economic science devoted to the explanation of market phenomena in terms of exact and universal laws. It
Region Focus interviewed me . It’s a publication of the Fed of Richmond. “The way I envision free banking, it does not rely on a particular base regime. It’s true, as a matter of history, that if you had free banking from the get-go, you wouldn’t have central banks and you would almost certainly have a commodity money standard, probably gold. The
Volume 12, No. 1 (2009) In a free market economy from which fiduciary media are excluded, economic progress will be limited, perhaps severely, by the high cost and correspondingly limited supply of small-denomination money—money that is needed to accomplish retail and other low-value exchanges. Historically, fiduciary token coins have proven to
Here is my piece on this Ron Paul idea in the Christian Science Monitor: Since it was introduced in February, Representative Ron Paul’s “Audit the Fed” bill (H.R. 1207) has gained 282 congressional cosponsors. If adopted, the bill would allow the Government Accountability Office to review, not only the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, but its
In response to my recent reply to Henderson and Hummel’s defense of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, I received a number of e-mail messages. They included one asking me for my two-cents concerning a dispute my correspondent was having with a friend of his who insisted that monetarism, and Milton Friedman’s monetarism in particular, had been a complete
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.