Austrian Economics Overview

From “Choice in Currency: A Path to Sound Money”; the Mises Circle in Vancouver. Recorded 13 September 2008.

Recorded at Mises University 2008.

Recorded at Mises University 2008.

We want to train and motivate the leaders of the future.

Progressive, proportional and regressive taxes. Rothbard is relentlessly not in favor of taxes. The state robs both rich and poor.

The uniqueness of the Austrian approach to taxation is to first cover Public Policy, then Antimarket Ethics and finally Taxation. It is a praxeological development approach. Robbery and counterfeiting are the revenues to the state. You can't look at taxation alone, you must look at expenditures, too.

Main objection to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is rational expectations - they can't prevent entrepreneurs from making use of loose credit because they would be left behind if they didn't.

Price controls, product controls, compulsory cartels, licenses, standards, tariffs, child labor laws, conscription, minimum wage laws, subsidies, penalties, anti-trust, conservation laws, patents, public utilities, eminent domain, and bribery are among the many triangular interventions by government that distort markets and reduce benefits to con

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments. Common criticisms of the free market are refuted praxeologically in this chapter. Absolute equality is an impossible goal.

Walter Block met Rothbard in 1966. Here, Block tells a joke making the point that antitrust law is dead from the neck up. There is nothing wrong with a monopoly price. Whatever price the free market establishes will be the best price.