It is unlikely that pundits, politicians, and the general public have ever been so obsessed with numbers as they are right now. I speak, of course, of the numbers surrounding deaths and illnesses attributed to COVID-19.

For months now, every new day has brought new headlines about total COVID-19 infections, total deaths, and estimates put out by models claiming to predict how many deaths will soon occur.

Many of my readers, I imagine, are in this position. You have read Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty. Or maybe some other book by Rothbard, or Ludwig von Mises’s Liberalism. Or maybe you have encountered the “argumentation ethics” of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You find what you read convincing, and you would say that you know that the free market views that these thinkers defend is correct.

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Social scientists have been trying for many years to blame homicides on the presence of guns. A favorite tool in this quest is the use of studies that show a correlation between gun ownership and crime. These studies are then reported as “evidence” that the presence of guns causes crime.

[This lecture was presented on July 18, 2020 at the 2020 Mises University.]

Oftentimes, people unfamiliar with the Austrian school tend to bundle it with political anarchism. There are—I believe—different possible explanations for that, but the most prominent ones seem to me the following two. First, it’s true that some Austrians can in effect be considered political anarchists as well. Second, the Austrian school is not only a school of thought about economics, but also (at least) about epistemology and political philosophy—i.e., it’s concerned with issues such as the relationship between individuals and states.

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The lockdown in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic has

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One of the most oft-cited and criticized goals of the Black Lives Matter organization is its stated desire to abolish the family as we know it.

Inflation, spending, and debt! Apparently, increasing these are the only way to restore normal market functions. Last week, in a speech called Navigating Monetary Policy through the Fog of COVID, Governor Lael Brainard, while explaining how the Fed aims to restore the flow of credit to households and businesses, extolled the virtues of inflationism as a formal policy.