What determines market prices? Buyers and sellers must know of feasible trades. They can learn from their mistakes. They prefer higher profits to lower profits. They think in discreet terms. Both participants win in market exchanges. Prices allocate resources to their highest uses. It is welfare-maximizing in any meaningful way. Prices are
Factors of Production are economic goods: scarce means used to achieve an individual’s ends. They are land, labor and capital. Each is examined. Incomes are earned by factor owners as production takes place. There is no separated production and distribution. Consumer goods and producer goods are subjectively determined by how they are used. Factor
Causal-realist analysis allows imaginary constructs like the ERE — Evenly Rotating Economy — in order to isolate certain factors like interest. There would be no profit or loss in the ERE, because those can only exist under conditions of uncertainty. Klein explains profit as a category, not a line item. The entrepreneur’s function is to
Competition can mean rivalry or freedom. All firms must serve the preferences of consumers in order to exist. Monopoly has historically been an artificial privilege granted by the state. Monopolies do not last for long in free markets unless maintained by government interventions. Antitrust policies were generally not demanded by consumers, but
“A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” F. A. Hayek is undoubtedly the most eminent of the modern Austrian economists. Student of Friedrich von Wieser, protégé and colleague of Ludwig von Mises, and foremost representative of an outstanding generation of Austrian school theorists,
The founders of social movements and schools of thought often try to distance themselves from their followers. (Or their later interpreters do this for them). Thus one can ask if Freud was a Freudian, Ricardo a Ricardian, Walras a Walrasian , Keynes a Keynesian (chapter 5 Keynesian? chapter 12 Keynesian?), and so on. What about Marx? Murray
[Cross posted at Organizations and Markets ] Most of my academic colleagues are anti-American food snobs. Why, those poor Yanks, they think Parmesan cheese is a white, powdery stuff in plastic cylinders rather than an expensive, thick, wedge with its maker’s mark on the skin. (Note the section “Other cheeses erroneously named Parmesan” in the
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.