Money and Our Future

Consider what it means to live through our times in the light of economic understanding. Even in the face of calamity, there is no mystery, and hence fear is reduced. You look at department stores going belly-up, and you know why. You see parking lots empty, and you know the reason. You have friends losing their jobs, and there is clarity concerning the cause. You see depositors in failing banks lose their money, and you are not surprised. Prices behave in ways that shock and surprise everyone else, but you know what’s what.

Austrian Economics: The Ultimate Achievement of an Intellectual Journey

[On November 1, 2008, Pascal Salin received the Gary Schlarbaum Prize for lifetime achievement in liberty. This is a lightly edited version of the lecture he delivered on the occasion, first published in Libertarian Papers, a new online journal of libertarian scholarship published by the Mises Institute. See the abstract and download options.

“Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?”

After a good Austrian bashing of the latest call to steal taxpayer money and waste it on something that will make a given problem worse, the stumped critics will often shout, “Oh yeah? Well do you guys have a better idea?” Even though “nothing” would be much, much better than all of the alleged remedies being bandied about, the Austrians actually do have concrete proposals for President Obama.

Does Monopoly Create Wealth?

[This is part 2 of my live blog of this book]

How strange this “intellectual property” issue is. In normal life, we tend to (or should) credit enterprise and markets for most innovations that surround us. I’m typing on a system here that includes products for several dozens different creative companies, with hardware and software and applications of all sorts stitched together through some miracle we call the coordinative power of the market. No news in that, I suppose. Ho hum.

An Internet KGB for Europe

In the 21st-century hunt for downloaders, we have, instead of mercantalism, the underlying ideology of IP, the theory that “intellectual property” is akin to real property. An international host of lawyers, rent seekers, and bureaucrats are working for the development and enforcement of IP laws. But they labor under the false assumption that there is a scarcity of ideas
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