[Included in The Bastiat Collection (2011), this article appeared in Economic Sophisms (1845).]
There is one thing that confounds me, and it is this. Sincere publicists, studying the economy of society from the producer’s point of view, have laid down this double formula:“Governments should order the interests of consumers who are subject to their laws, in such a way as to be favorable to national industry.”
[Included in The Bastiat Collection (2011), this article appeared in Economic Sophisms (1845).]
As advocates of free trade, we are accused of being theorists, and of not taking practice sufficiently into account. “What fearful prejudices were entertained against Mr. Say,” says Mr. Ferrier,
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.
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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:
