Capital and Interest Theory

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Recorded at Mises University 2001.

Recorded at the Reassessing the Presidency seminar; March 2004.

Boom, Bust, and the Future (26:23) January 18-19, 2002

Boom, Bust, and the Future (26:36) January 18-19, 2002

Microeconomics starts with the basic fact that each person has short term and long term goals, like buying a ham sandwich and graduating from college. People act in the world to accomplish something. Human action is purposive. You employ different means to achieve certain goals.

The Center for Responsible Lending says that payday lending is a predatory business in that it lures borrowers into a "debt trap." Mike Foley says this view is all wrong: pay-day lending provides liquidity when it is most needed, and an an opportunity to establish a positive credit history.

A common accusation against libertarianism, writes Llewellyn Rockwell, is that we are unnaturally obsessed with tracing social and economic problems to the state, and, in doing so, we oversimplify the world. If you let the people who say this keep talking, they will explain to you why the state is not all bad, that some of its actions yield positive results and, in any case, the state should not always be singled out as some sort of grave evil.

In a wide-ranging interview Sudha Shenoy comments on her decision to become an economist, the influence of Rothbard and Kirzner, the politics of Hayek, current trends in global trade, US protectionism, the bad turn in economic theorizing, and the need to resolve the conflict between Islam and the West.

Why is it that a capitalist can apparently spend a certain amount of money on factors of production, combine them according to a technological recipe in order to yield a physical product, and then sell this product for more money than he originally spent on the inputs? One view says this is due to abstinence, but Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk provided the correction.