The incredible popularity of the Mises Institute’s website is due mainly to the great content it contains, but no one would know about all that content without the software behind it. While I wrote the content management system for Mises.org, I couldn’t have done it without the ideas and sample code provided by the developer community. In recognition of this, I will be making much of the website available as open-source projects, beginning with the DotTag tagging framework.

Last Friday, an enthusiastic review of Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s Mises: The Last Knight of Liberty appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s top newspaper among non-tabloid dailies.

Not that it is the epitome of free-markets in action, however it arguably still retains some semblance of competition as the firms must satisfy the wants of each consumer in order to stay in business (bailouts notwithstanding).

In the aftermath of that ghastly horror called the Great War, Warren Gamaliel Harding ran for president and won. His platform: Return to normalcy. He was the dark-horse candidate, but won 60% of the vote. Among his first actions was to pardon Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate, who had been jailed for opposing the war draft. He reduced taxes, deregulated, and generally calmed down the country after a culture-wrecking, budget-busting war, and assured a time of great prosperity.

I have never had much enthusiasm for following politics; I found that a blanket condemnation of the whole subspecies Officeseeker stood me in good stead and saved me time to focus on more useful things, such as Lindsey Lohan’s current status.[1] I have never willingly given money to any politician, never pitched a chirpy phone call to a fellow citizen reminding them that today is election day, never joined any political party whatsoever, feeling that those who do missed the whole point of the Federalist Papers.

Austrian economists argue that individuals’ preferences are relevant to resource allocation only to the extent that they are demonstrated through action. Economics is, after all, about the process by which subjective preferences are converted into objective, observable market phenomena like prices and quantities (see Joe Salerno’s comment here). The Walrasian model, by contrast, takes consumer valuations as explicit magnitudes.

If Garet Garrett (1878–1954) is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of in

Robert Higgs, Schlaurbaum laureate, delivers his address: The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised — a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide. Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries.

Around the world there are many academics who make a living from Austrian economics. They write books, publish articles, organize conferences and are the people at the forefront of the movement. By constantly critiquing themselves and others, they build upon the Misesian framework, enriching, developing and deepening our understanding of praxeology. This group of people could be referred to as the producers of Austrian economics. There is another group of course: the consumers of Austrianism.