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.
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.
John Brätland lives with his wife Rose Marie in Bethesda, Maryland. He is currently employed as a senior economist in the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, DC. Although he is a critic of war in general, his army experience earned him the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star (with the ‘v’ for valor) for his service in Viet Nam.
It’s here. Frustrated that “nominal interest rates cannot be reduced below zero,” he makes the case that “unconventional” approaches are needed (direct purchases of securities with freshly created, high-powered money). This is not a problem, he says, because the Fed “will take account of the potential costs and risks of nonconventional policies…”
If inflation goes wild, it is your fault for not trusting the Fed:
Do you want to convince someone that anarcho-capitalism is the solution? Then you had better have a response to this very real situation:
