Mises Daily

Randall Holcombe talks about his new textbook on Austrian economics: “The idea was to write a book for people who already know some economics,” Holcombe says.

The television show American Pickers shows many economic concepts in action, such as comparative advantage and specialization and trade, and it also illustrates numerous Austrian insights such as subjective value and the role of the entrepreneur.

Drug warriors rely on bad and manipulated data to make the claim that respecting private property rights in Colorado is “terrible public policy.”

Increasing the supply of fiat money, also known as inflation, leads to a myriad of social and economic ills, affecting employment, the family, emotional health, and more.

Investor Mark Spitznagel and Ron Paul discuss agriculture policy, Wall Street, fiat money, investing, and Ron Paul’s plans for the future.

Supporters of minimum wage hikes claim that such hikes have little or no effect on employment, but the law of demand makes it clear that the effects of such price controls are very real.

Many people are willing to donate much money to clean up government-owned lakes and streams and to spend many hours fundraising and complaining about pollution. But suggest to those people they should just pay market prices for access to those same bodies of water, they become indignant.

Political consultants and mainstream reporters are fixated on conventional electoral politics, as if no other form of societal change were conceivable. Meanwhile, the real threat to the established political order is the intellectual movement behind radical free-market libertarianism that continues to build and grow.

Austrian economists have been wrongly accused of many intellectual crimes when it comes to fractional reserve banking. Robert Batemarco adds some clarity to the debate.

It’s difficult to envisage a downward-sloping yield curve in an unhampered market economy since this would imply that investors are assigning a higher risk to short-term maturities than long-term maturities. But in today’s economy, an upward or a downward sloping yield curve reflects the Fed’s interest rate policies.