Other Schools of Thought

As the Trump administration cuts thousands of federal jobs, it‘s good to remember that the public sector‘s “services” provide no actual net value to the “national product.”

Elon Musk‘s latest comments on money make the same errors as we saw with Milton Friedman and the Monetarists. If Musk really wants to understand money, he needs to read Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises.

Mainstream economists make too much out of “knowledge.” First, the kind of knowledge one needs to be successful in an economy is not knowing things generally but having an understanding that is more than knowing mere facts. The entrepreneur‘s judgement is ultimately what matters.

When it seemed central Europe would succumb to the terrors of Bolshevism, Ludwig von Mises wrote his classic book, Socialism, convincing fellow Austrians that socialism was destructive. Mises influenced F.A. Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom had similar effects in the US.

Why do we study history? Some study it as a way to confirm their own political ideologies, something that often happens when historians look at the US Civil War and its Reconstruction aftermath. According to Ludwig von Mises, one cannot bring an ideological lens and honestly approach history.

Americans once dreamed of a country that did not care about global greatness or glory. It was within our reach if we had been wise enough to grasp and hold it.

Marxism is seen by American and European intellectuals as being a sophisticated and legitimate set of theories that explains social problems in capitalist societies. Yet, the entire edifice of Marxism from “class conflict” to the Labor Theory of Value is nonsense.

One of the unique features of Austrian economics is a coherent and consistent theory of business cycles. To understand business cycles, one must understand the role that interest rates play in the economy.

One of the fallacies of modern academic neoclassical economics is that we can take cardinal measures of value. Austrian economists, beginning with Carl Menger, know better.

The focus is on individual human action makes Austrian economics unique, as well as logically valid and compelling. It is a system of economic analysis based upon praxeology and causal-realism.