Mises in Europe
This magazine is pretty high profile in Germany, and this article is the latest installment of a series on “great economists.”
Using the Web to Beat Back the State
Well, I just gave myself a five minute education on an important topic, namely how the TSA and Congress and various other interests including the Obama admin are planning to tax and regulate smaller airlines known as general aviation, which is the sector of pilots and planes that is neither military nor scheduled commercial.
Playing Chicken in Memphis
Competition means that unexploited profit opportunities do not stay unexploited for very long. If Fowler Foods is overlooking a robust market for grilled chicken in Memphis, then I encourage the company’s critics to stop squawking, enter the market, and show them the error of their ways by earning profits in the market for grilled chicken.
Whose Right Is It, Anyway?
Recently, the Shelby County Commission passed an ordinance that would make it illegal for employers and firms that contract with the county to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. Unfortunately, the debate largely ignored the key issue, which is whether it is just, moral, and appropriate to use force to correct others’ wayward beliefs.
Correcting Quiggin on Austrian Business-Cycle Theory
Australian economist John Quiggin
The Mises-Hayek theory of the business cycle — and of our recent housing bubble in particular — is gaining more and more adherents in the “real world.” To give anecdotal evidence: Five years ago, when I’d write a Mises Daily article, the fan mail would pour in from college students. But now, I get questions from hedge-fund managers and others working in the financial sector. Austrian economics is no longer a hobby; this is serious stuff.
Austrian Recipe vs. Keynesian Fantasy
The current crisis has revealed the Keynesian roots of mainstream economics. The only debate has been the type and size of bailouts and stimulus packages. The Keynesian fantasy is really a monomania because ultimately it is a fixation on a single panacea — more government spending. Meanwhile, the Austrians have the opposite set of policy guidelines and have heroically held to their recipe of liquidation.
Kevin Carson’s Intellectual Property — A Libertarian Critique
Kevin Carson has just released his Intellectual Property–A Libertarian Critique. I haven’t had a chance to read all of it yet, but from a quick skim it looks good, and with a title like this–and given that IP is turning out to be an insidious tool wielded by the state to destroy and re-route wealth–it’s worth looking into.
Obama’s Magic Bubble Deflator
Sometimes I wish our overlords would get their stories straight. First, Alan Greenspan told us it was impossible to tell if a bubble existed at any given time. Now we have Barack Obama insisting that not only can we detect bubbles, but we can also deflate them with sufficient dispatch to prevent them from causing any serious economic disturbances.
A Rejoinder to Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong provides some arithmetic that supposedly weighs against the Austrian theory of the business cycle as a plausible basis for understanding the current recession. The differences between DeLong and the Austrians are not to be resolved by doing the math but by understanding the theory. Tellingly, DeLong has overestimated and, at the same time, underestimated the significance of the housing bubble in the Austrians’ view of the current recession.
Neither Brown Nor Red
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, conservatives bitterly attacked the movie Reds when it came out in 1981. After all these years, the movie holds up as one of the most intellectually interesting and visually powerful portrayals of lost history that I’ve seen. I’ve never been sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as versus the old regime in Russia, but the scenes here from the revolution are completely inspired and touch the heart of anyone who agrees with Jefferson on the positive need for revolution from time to time.
