“The Death of French Savings, the Russian Bonds Story 1880-1996″ By Antoine Clarke

Nicolai Foss and I have worked on many projects together, including our 2012 book Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment. Foss is an eminent scholar whose expertise ranges from strategic management and entrepreneurship to Austrian capital theory, human resource management, business model innovation, and many other subjects. (Here is his 2012 Hayek Lecture at the AERC.)

Interviewed by host Alan Butler, Mark Thornton discusses gun control in the early days of Nazi Germany.

Sometimes, a federal grant is worthless. The federal government has the ability to attach enough costly provisions to its grants that the net value is less than zero.

Because of their privileged status as subsidized institutions protected from the marketplace, colleges and universities are not sensitive to the desires or needs of their customers. In a normal, marketplace environment, higher education institutions would seek to provide services and offend as few customers as possible, while providing maximum value.

Well, they’re often economical for the patent holder in the short-run. But over time, a legal regime that discourages information-sharing simply closes off advances in technology. Defenders of government-granted monopolies (i.e. patents) often rely make broad claims that allegedly show that inventions would not be made were it not for patents. True history, on the other hand, generally shows the exact opposite as in the case of William Gilmour and the power loom.

     The first-ever libertarians were the Levellers, an English political movement active in the seventeenth century. The Levellers contributed to the elaboration of the methodological and political paradigm of individualism, and they are at the origin of the radical strand of classical liberalism. While the Levellers are often characterized as a quasi-socialist movement, the aim of my research is to restore the Levellers to their classical liberal heritage, and to find out to what extent they were in fact libertarian.

Mark Thornton explains how silver money keeps inflation in check.