Mises Daily Wednesday by Ryan McMaken. 

Ebenezer Scrooge is guilty of no crime, but he is a bad economist. This is demonstrated by Scrooge’s ignorance about the subjective nature of value, and by his insistence that he is being robbed by his clerk who negotiates a day off.

Madhusudan Raj writes from India:

Jeff Deist writes at the Mises Institute Facebook page, in response to this NR column: 

“Neoconservative National Review can’t help itself when it comes to Cuba. The deeply ingrained impulse to use state power for control, punishment, and reward cannot be reconciled with a professed belief in limited government or classical liberalism.”

Mises Daily Tuesday by Julian Adorney.

Where police fail, as at Ferguson and in Detroit, private firms and volunteers have stepped in. And yet the state continues to claim that its employed enforcers are a thin blue line between order and chaos.

Peak Oil Was Nonsense, and the Ghost of the 1981 Oil Price Crash Looms

Mises Daily Monday by Matt Battaglioli: 

Many advocates for socialized medicine point to the World Health Organization’s claim that US healthcare ranks below dozens of other countries. But these rankings are biased in favor of cheap health care over quality health care... 

A recent article in the left-leaning Independent argued that student volunteers are useless. In one project putting UK college students to work building a local school, the work was so awful that local Ugandan masons “dismantled the structurally unsound work [the students] had done — relaying bricks and resetting timbers whilst the students slept.”

[This is David Gordon’s introductory essay to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s new book From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy.]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a master of theoretical history. He tells us that

it is not my purpose here to engage in standard history, i.e., history as it is written by historians, but to offer a logical or sociological reconstruction of history, informed by actual historical events, but motivated more fundamentally by theoretical — philosophical and economic — concerns.