Henry Hazlitt tried to explain economics in one lesson in his famous book . What lesson? The lesson conveyed by Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 analogy of the broken window. This is the lesson of the fallacy of the thing not seen. An economist should always consider what the owner of a broken window would have done with the money that he must now spend to
Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise
Every once in a while, I see a car bearing bumper sticker, “Buy American.” From what I gather, it is a popular sticker in Michigan, especially in cities like Detroit and Pontiac. “Americans have to pull together,” we are told. “They ought to help each other. If they don’t stop buying those foreign imports, they’re going to kill the U.S. economy.”
[ Reprinted from Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader , compiled by Bettina G. Greaves .] The division of labor is a subject which has fascinated social scientists for millennia. Before the advent of modem times, philosophers and theologians concerned themselves with the implications of the idea. Plato saw as the ultimate form of society a
Mises never tired of telling his students and readers that trends can change. What makes them change are the choices we make, the values we hold, the ideas we advance, the institutions we support...Unlike Mises, we do not face obstacles that appear hopelessly high. We owe it to his memory to throw ourselves completely into the intellectual
One of the foundational principles of free market economics is the principle of personal responsibility. Individuals are responsible for their own actions. This is true not simply in the realm of the free market itself. It also applies to the realm of nonprofits, including churches, foundations, and charitable institutions of all kinds. While
I have spent my whole adult life in the shadow of one man, Karl Marx. By the age of 14, I recognized how important Marx was in history. I began to study some of his writings when I was a senior in high school. I continued to study him seriously in graduate school, and in 1968 my book on Marx was published. Karl Marx changed the world. Yet he did
History is an easy subject to teach if you are intellectually lazy. It is the most challenging subject to teach if you have a great memory, read a lot, and care about understanding causes and effects. You keep having to rewrite your narrative to fill the same number of lessons every year. Time marches on. If you pad your lectures, no big problem.
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.