While everyone was chatting about the 2018-2019 United States government shutdown, House Democrats introduced a universal background check bill H.R. 8 on January 8, 2019.

My wife and I read a quirky newsletter you won’t find online called the Belly of the Beast. It is the source of this startling but then again not surprising information: Academic researchers publish 2-3 million papers a year, most of it funded by governments. Most of the results of the this research are published in copyright protected journals owned by private companies, especially the giant German company Elsevier, companies that together are thought to earn over $25 billion.

Listen to Ryan McMaken’s commentary on the Radio Rothbard podcast.

Among advocates for free-markets, I’m often told that the unconverted will embrace free-markets if only we explain to them “good economics.”

ABSTRACT: This article discusses the influence of the initiation of the Second Socialist Calculation Debate on my own subsequent research and contributions to that debate, and briefly summarizes that research presented in articles on arguments made by Plato, Karl Marx, Friedrich von Wieser, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Joseph Schumpeter, and Israel Kirzner. It also mentions some of the changes in Austrian economics understanding stimulated by the Second Socialist Calculation Debate, and suggests a direction for future research.

ABSTRACT:

Hoffmann (2018) attempts to reconstruct a typology of risks deemed more accurate and useful to both economists and risk managers than currently received views on the subject within mainstream economics/finance and Austrian economics. This comment argues that his criticisms of the Misesian approach and his case for an alternative are unconvincing. We explain weaknesses in his criticisms of the Misesian approach and outline some problems with his constructive task of building up the alternative.

There is no more recent example of the many theoretically apparent pitfalls of socialism coming to life than in Venezuela. The South American nation is but the latest example on the long list of countries to have fallen victim to the siren’s song of a socialist utopia.

Universa Investments Chief Investment Officer Mark Spitznagel sits down with Bloomberg‘s Erik Schatzker to discuss the next market crash, the size of the hedge fund industry and worries around hedging market risk.

Watch it here.