The Ludwig von Mises Institute welcomes its new Executive Director, and inaugural Carl Menger Research Fellow, Peter G. Klein!
Lew Rockwell announced the appointment at the Manhattan Mises Circle.
Click here for audio, or read the transcript:
Regime Uncertainty and Slow Recovery
Robert Higgs at the Beacon again reminds us that “anemic investment recovery evinces, at least in part, the prevailing regime uncertainty brought about by the Fed’s and the Bush and Obama administrations’ massive, ill-advised, and counter-productive interventions in the economy during the past five years.”
Jason Brennan, an outstanding libertarian political philosopher who teaches at Georgetown University, has written Libertarianism as an introductory guide, and much of the material in it will be familiar to readers of the Mises Daily; but it deserves careful study by anyone interested in its subject. Brennan has a talent for explaining libertarian views in striking and effective ways. The book consists of 105 questions about libertarianism and Brennan’s responses to them.
“The theorems of economics, say the historicists, are void because they are the product of a priori reasoning. Only historical experience can lead to realistic economics. They fail to see that historical experience is always the experience of complex phenomena, of the joint effects brought about by the operation of a multiplicity of elements. Such historical experience does not give the observer facts in the sense in which the natural sciences apply this term to the results obtained in laboratory experiments.
A recent comment by Bryan Caplan provides a good opportunity to discuss differences between Austrian and neoclassical concepts of marginal utility. In response to Steve Horwitz, who claimed that the law of diminishing marginal utility and the downward-sloping demand curve can be known a prior, Bryan asks:
[Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)]
With the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic which eventually provided the context — or rather, pretext — for America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore.
