I’m reviewing my notes for a lecture I’m giving in Denver in about an hour, and I came across notes about an FTC judgment against Toys-R-Us claiming that they were stifling competition by using their market power as a toy distributor. In light of the recent bankruptcy filing by Blockbuster, I started to wonder: what is the effect of a negative antitrust ruling on the probability of a future bankruptcy filing? In short, how many so-called monopolists ended up belly-up within a few years of their antitrust proceedings?

A Norwegian blogger has written what he believes to be a sweeping defense of “intellectual property” rooted in moral claims and natural rights. I always enjoy reading these pieces, if only for sport: it is interesting to see where the argument begins to fall apart, as it necessarily must. And this is because IP is a state-created right that cannot exist in purely voluntary exchange.

Nowadays, Austrian economists are most famous for their theory of the business cycle, as developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. However, they also made many contributions to the pure theory of capital and interest, most notably in the seminal work of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and later in that of Hayek.

After having written several pieces (1 2 3 4 5 6) on Antal Fekete’s neo-Real Bills Doctrine (RBD) I had not intended to address the issue again.

There is a lot of talk about “social entrepreneurship” and “Doing Well by Doing Good”. What is almost completely ignored, however, is the inherent social function of all entrepreneurship. What people need to become more familiar with is the opposite of the usual phrase; they need to become familiar with the notion of Doing Good by Doing Well. A great primer on the social function of all entrepreneurship is the essay Profit and Loss by Mises.

No, he was not talking about marriage. He was talking about an aspect of the praxeological approach to economics, in which we start with certain incontestable (apriori) propositions (related to human action and its categories), and we explicitly introduce certain contingent facts to make the inquiry interesting. For example, we posit a society with money instead of a barter society. This insight of Mises has long intrigued me.

It’s bad enough that IP advocates dishonestly use the word “theft” to describe use of your own property in contravention of a monopoly issued by the state. (After all, as Nina Paley reminds us, copying is not theft; when you use information to guide your action or configure your own property, the originator of the idea still has it.) But use of the word “piracy” to describe pattern-copying is going too far.