Economics is the study of how humans manage their scarce resources in the face of uncertainty. The goal of a good economist is to understand the mechanisms through which people achieve this, to analyze the working of the economic order and present a comprehensive theory of how it functions. This is all economists should do and all we should expect by them. However, it is all the more common to anticipate economists to provide us with plan to fix all our economic problems as well as anticipate those that have yet to appear.

Most economists today regard the use of mathematical and statistical methods as the key towards understanding the complexities of economics. They believe that in order to be scientific, economics should follow in the footsteps of natural sciences and primarily use mathematical and statistical methods, by which an economist establishes relationships between various variables. For example, personal consumer outlays are related to personal disposable income and interest rates. Economists presenting this relation as

C= a*Yd – b*i

Leonard Read was an important leader in the libertarian movement from the time he started the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946 until his death. What primarily put him in that role was his unwavering commitment to liberty. But it was also due to his concern with the fact that not all forms of leadership and education were effective and consistent with liberty. While he dealt with those latter issues widely throughout his work, it was the main topic of his 1962 Elements of Libertarian Leadership, passing its 60th anniversary this year.

The President of the United States says he has a plan to address inflation. NBC provides an annotated transcript of this week’s State of the Union Address. Some points of interest:

Inflation rose 7.5% for January over the previous year, beating the 40-year high set in December. Price increases hit food, electricity and housing, in particular.

Persons have a natural right to go into business together, and they may do so either as a partnership or a corporation. In the latter type of organization, the persons setting it up limit their civil liability (I won’t be concerned in this article with the vast and complex issues raised by this). The people who set up a corporation are the owners, and they hold stock in it. Modern corporations normally consist also of managers, including the CEO, and a board of directors, but all of these are agents of the shareholders and act in their interest.

Review of Michael Kulikowski, Imperial Triumph: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (London: Profile Books, 2016) and Imperial Tragedy: From Constantine’s Empire to the Destruction of Roman Italy (London: Profile Books, 2019)

Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-sixth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed, in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point.