Austrian Economics Overview

Mises is one of the greatest men who ever lived for his insights into what he called "human action."

A free market is just people making voluntary exchanges. Woods makes an example out of the creation of a ham sandwich. Welfare and warfare undermine the natural economic harmony of large scale social cooperation - the free market.

Sound money even sounds heavier than unsound money. Gold and silver originated on the market and reigned as the preferred money because the metals were easily portable, homogeneous, highly divisible, highly durable, and naturally scarce. Paper has none of those attributes.

Austrian economists do have a realistic way of looking at human action. A policy of getting further into debt when you are already deeply in debt just doesn't make sense to them.

"The conference on Austrian economics was planned as a catalyst for expanding interest in the praxeological approach. To this end, the conference must be declared a resounding success."

"Recognizing the inability of their sophisticated models to predict or even explain the financial collapse and subsequent Great Recession, leading macroeconomic theorists of the day have lapsed back into raw and simplistic Keynesianism."

Jeffrey Tucker interviews John Papola. Recorded 13 March 2010.

Recorded March 12, 2010, at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

Recorded March 12, 2010, at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.