In A Short History of Man, I try to explain three of the most momentous events in the history of mankind.

First, I explain the origin of private property, and in particular of ground land, and of the family and the family household as the institutional foundations of agriculture and agrarian life that began some 11,000 years ago, with the Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent of the Near-East, and that has since — until well through the late nineteenth century — come to shape and leave an imprint on human life everywhere.

A good chunk of the debate over inequality today centers around what Milton Friedman identified as “the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” This fallacy is one that any student of economics is familiar with, but the layman may not be: the fixed pie fallacy. The fixed pie fallacy is synonymous with the zero-sum fallacy in economics: that anyone’s benefit comes at someone else’s expense. In other words, if one person earns a dollar, someone else is worse off by a dollar.

Mises Daily Wednesday by Mark Thornton: 

Measuring aggregate prices through a consumer price index is inherently arbitrary because someone decides what to measure and how. There are better ways to do it, but “fixing” the measure will do nothing to fix the ills of the Fed’s monetary policy.

In this lengthy interview, Walter Block talks to the Brazilian libertarian group “Liberball” about a wide variety of topics from revisionist history to business regulation to Murray Rothbard. 

On April 15, Walter Block joined host Phil Pepin (at 28:00) to discuss anarchism and the international system of states. [Mp3 download.]

Mark Thornton also joined Pepin on April 1 (at 2:00) to discuss his article “Transparency or Deception: What the Fed Was Saying in 2007.”  [Mp3 download.]

One of the great ironies of American politics is that most politicians who talk about helping the middle class support policies that, by expanding the welfare-warfare state, are harmful to middle-class Americans. Eliminating the welfare-warfare state would benefit middle-class Americans by freeing them from exorbitant federal taxes, including the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax.

Joe Salerno, like Ludwig von Mises, is not only a great economist but a great teacher of economics as well. Since 2005, he has been in charge of the Mises Institute Summer Fellows program. In this program, graduate students spend a summer at the Institute. They engage in regular discussions; and, under Joe’s direction, they prepare a research paper. He has a masterly ability to discern at once the direction in which a student’s argument is heading.

Mises Institute: How did you first learn about Austrian economics and the Mises Institute?

Most of the United States west of the 100th meridian is very dry. But back in the 19th century, when a period of unusually wet growing seasons was observed in the American West, many claimed it was proof that God was sending rain to help the white man settle the West, which had formerly been much more arid. God had withheld the rain from the “savages,” but now that the Americans had arrived, “the Great American Desert” as it had often been called, was going to turn green.