David Friedman maintains that the “Austrian Test” (the short edition that he took; here is the long version ) is not a good means to evaluate views on economics, particularly as it relates to the Chicago School . Actually it is, and any problems that arise from it are caused by the unclear and incomplete answers given by Chicago economists.
Mr. Kling is so disappointed in the Austrian Test that he has named the Austrian School a “sect”. His fundamental criticism is this: “I found it interesting that the ‘Are you an Austrian?’ quiz does not distinguish between knowledge of doctrine and belief in doctrine.” Now, the questions are not tricky; in fact, they are very simple and address
Mr. Roberts offers a very interesting definition of a “free trade”. In his opinion free trade rests on the condition of immobility of factors of production – if factors of production are free to move from one place to another, then this is no longer free trade . The argument is fallacious from the very beginning and is similar to economic concept
Mr. Roberts also criticizes Professor Salerno : “Mr. Salerno also confuses the mobility of factors of production within a country with the international mobility of factors of production. The two things are entirely different. The flow of factors of production within the US from North to South or East to West is not comparable in the effects to
I happy to report to that Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.’s article “ Bandits and loopholes “ has been printed in Polish conservative-libertarian weekly magazine “ Najwyzszy Czas !”. It has about 40-50 thousand readers (official numbers are not available). It is about 10% of Polish Newsweek edition, so has a pretty big audience. Here are some scans of
Linguist, Psychologist, and author Claude Piron authored an interesting essay, which I just came across, on Psychological Aspects of the World Language Problem and of Esperanto (English Translation) , which has some interesting parallels to the cause of classical liberalism. On a fervent desire to have one’s movement go forward more quickly,
Earlier this week, the Oxfam organization published a “ report ” about global inequality. It’s not really a report, since most of it consists of babble-economics with little empirical foundation, and the hard data that it includes comes from an external source: the Credit Suisse Report . In any case, this data indicates that there is a lot of
One often wonders whether differences in economic schools of thought are big enough to justify strict theoretical segregations. One such case is “marginal economics.” Most textbooks point to the triumvirate of Walras, Jevons, and Menger, who independently discovered the notion of marginal utility and its relevance to the pricing process. Quite
I am very happy to inform that the Polish Mises Institute is preparing the Polish translation of Human Action which should be ready by the end of 2007. The book has not been translated into Polish yet and Mises is mostly known in Poland only for his minor works. If you would like to learn more please visit this
“The A-team” supports the idea of natural law, rejects the nominalist tradition, rejects relativism both on ethical and epistemological grounds, supports entrepreneurship and free market, praises division of labor and monetary economy, builds its morality on the nonaggression axiom, rejects the necessity for economic regulation, undermines the
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.