One of the first lessons I give my economics students in the principles courses I teach or in my MBA classes is the famous Diamond-Water Paradox, or what economists historically have called the Paradox of Value. Why are diamonds more expensive than water? Why are professional athletes paid better than teachers or soldiers?

Canada’s federal government wants cigarettes to self-extinguish when we stop smoking them, believing this will reduce incidents of death and injury from fires caused by careless smoking. Thus, since 2005 the government has mandated the use of reduced ignition propensity (RIP) materials in the manufacture of all cigarettes.

In an election year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is suddenly neck deep in a corruption scandal that could cost him his job. The scandal stems from “ongoing fraud and corruption charges” against SNC-Lavalin (SNC), a large international engineering and construction firm based in Montreal. The charges are “linked to alleged dealings with the Moammar Gadhafi regime in Libya between 2001 and 2011.”

Getting Libertarianism Right. By Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2018. 126 pages. Introduction by Sean Gabb.

The title of Hans Hoppe’s wonderful new book has a double meaning. We need to get libertarianism right — to understand libertarianism correctly. How can we do this? By realizing that if we want a libertarian society, we need to embrace the values of the Right.

ABSTRACT: There is an avoidable tension in a recently presented argument against the income effect from the perspective of Austrian or causal-realist price theory. The argument holds that a constant purchasing power of money is a necessary assumption for constructing an individual demand curve for a specific good, and hence that price changes along the demand curve are by definition incapable of exerting a “purchasing power effect,” that is, an income effect in standard neoclassical terminology. Price changes are, however, never neutral to the purchasing power of money.

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.