Why do individuals pay much higher prices for some goods versus other goods? The common reply to this is the law of supply and demand. What is behind this law? To provide an answer to this question economists refer to the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Mainstream economics explains the law of diminishing marginal utility in terms of the satisfaction that one derives from consuming a particular good. For instance, an individual derives vast satisfaction from consuming one cone of ice cream.

ABSTRACT: According to Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT), there is no macroeconomic market failure. Under laissez faire capitalism, with extremely limited or no government, there will be no credit-induced business cycles. However, suppose one part of the world engages in credit expansion, which, according to ABCT creates the business cycle, while another does not. Will the former infect the latter? Or will the latter be impervious to the governmental depredations of the former?

ABSTRACT: In the division of labor, economizing valuations require an appraisement of the structure of market prices of goods beforehand. Yet, investment decisions concerning the purchase of an entire business enterprise, for example, necessitate considerations beyond appraisement. An economizing valuation of businesses must be based upon both appraisement and a genuine investment appraisal which provides the valuing person with the marginal price he can barely accept.

Professor Reisman delivered this talk at a TEDx event held at Sage Hill High School in Newport Beach, California, on February 15, 2019.

The income tax is “undoubtedly the most totalitarian of all taxes.1
—Murray Rothbard

Since when are industriousness and hard work criticized? The New York Times op-ed page. Alissa Quart complains,

this nouveau moonlighting continues to be exalted ­as cool, empowering or freeing. This mantra is false: Side hustles are not simply a new version of working as a “wage slave” so that we can do what we love in our off hours. Instead, far more often, people take on second or third side hustles because of wage stagnation or low pay at their full-time jobs.

A few years ago, shortly after the 2008 subprime lending disaster, the Fed sent a public relations team around the country to conduct supposedly “educational sessions” about how the Fed works and the wonderful things it does. The public was invited, and there was a question and answer session at the end of the presentation. One such session was held in Des Moines, Iowa. At the time I was teaching a course in Austrian economics at the University of Iowa, so I lusted at the prospect of hearing complete nonsense and having a shot at asking a question. I was not disappointed.

What is most exciting about the Austrian methodology of economic inquiry is that, to quote Mises himself, it does not relegate economics to the classrooms, to the “statistical offices,” and to “esoteric circles.” It instead offers to all who seek such knowledge, a body of insights as to how men relate to other men and how society itself developed from conditions of impoverished despair to a world of abundance and comfort.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo just approved a $175.5 billion budget, boasting it as the “broadest, most sweeping state plan that we have done.”