Many advocates for free markets often mistakenly speak of "the market" as if markets by themselves somehow solve problems or provide incentives. Only people can do these things, and markets are just a means to an end.
Lego has finally managed to attract girls to their products with the Lego Friends line. In response, feminists have denounced the line for being too "girly." But Lego is just responding to market demand and what Mises called consumer sovereignty.
Rather than a cold estimate of the probability of future returns, the Powerball actually illustrates the subjective theory of value.
There were many state and local elections in the US this week, but few of them will result in anything that will combat widely held and popular errors about central banking, drug prohibition, and the global environment.
Without markets, there is no way to manage scarce resources, and this includes natural resources like forests. Only markets can provide the sort of balanced long-term planning necessary to both utilize and preserve natural resources.
Investors and real estate agents often tell people to “buy land, they’re not making any more!” But in truth, land is heterogeneous, and whether or not it increases in value depends on many factors that can transform nearly worthless land into valuable land.
Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 20 July 2015.
Many claim that great advances in technology come primarily through government spending on research. In fact, government tech spending crowds out other innovations while favoring certain interest groups at everyone else's expense.
We’re often told that some prices should be high, and some others should be low. But the real goal should not be high prices or low prices, but a price system that communicates what is valued in society.
The rich make new resource-intensive products economically feasible. Those wealthy early-adopters of new products act as mannequins on which new products are draped, increasing demand as producers attempt to bring those products to the mass market.
