Frenchman Jean Tirole of the University of Toulouse won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for devising methods to improve regulation of industries dominated by a few large firms. According to Tirole, large firms undermine the efficient functioning of the market economy by being able to influence the prices and the quantity of products.

Consequently, this undermines the well being of individuals in the economy. On this way of thinking the inefficiency emerges as a result of the deviation from the ideal state of the market as depicted by the “perfect competition” framework.

David Stockman’s huge volume on the background of the 2008 financial crisis, and on the role of the fed and government bailouts in the continuing crisis, is now available in Polish.

The West Coast Regional Mises Circle in Costa Mesa is sold out, but be sure and mark your calendars so you can join us live via Mises.org. On November 8 —one week from Saturday— we’ll be broadcasting all the lectures and speeches from Costa Mesa. I’ll provide you exact links as the event draws nearer.

Here’s the schedule:

Tentative Schedule (all times Pacific)

10:20 a.m. Welcome

10:30 a.m. Jeff Deist “The Case for Optimism”

Michael Pollaro, Mark Thornton, and I went looking for some good introductory materials to help newcomers understand Austrian Business Cycle Theory.

Pollaro posted this helpful article over at Forbes, noting:

NPR recently reported on a June 2014 journal article in which political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood conclude that one’s political affiliation is now the primary source of group polarization in America, outpacing even race as a major source of conflict.

If you use the word contagion these days, people are likely to think you’re talking about ebola. Back up five years ago, however, and contagion was the buzzword to describe the financial crisis.

With the IRS scandals of early 2014 all but a distant memory, some closure is coming to the groups that the long arm of the tax law harassed. Unfortunately the verdicts aren´t going the way the affected would like.

The IRS may have inadvertently figured out how to win its legal battles against aggrieved tea party groups: Give them what they wanted in the first place — tax-exempt status.

In his recent three-part interview (here, here and here) on the gold standard, Larry White perplexes almost as much as he enlightens.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act focused the attention of Americans on government regulation as few issues have. However, they should have paid attention decades earlier because states have been eating away like termites at freedom in the healthcare insurance market for decades. The PPACA adds little to existing state regulations. States began dictating to insurance companies what to cover, whom to cover, when to cover them and how much they could charge in the 1950s.