Free Markets

It is the Mises Institute's great pleasure to introduce Carl Menger's 1871 book Principles of Economics to an online audience.

To be an Austrian has become oddly fashionable in recent days, observes Sean Corrigan, judging from the number of news reports thus describing commentators on economic and financial affairs. 

Should we prefer the "open society" or the free society? Is there a conflict between social cooperation and economic competition? There are the essential questions, writes George Reisman, that are driving debate about the future of economic liberty.

How much of the spectrum should be privatized? All of it, writes B.K. Marcus. Even the vast "beachfront property" held by the military? Yes, all of it. 

Economists of an Austrian bent just can't take off their analytical spectacles, writes Mark Thornton, even when undertaking simple life activities like driving from here to there.

Chris Westley asks what Shel Silverstein really meant to say with his book The Giving Tree. It is bad economics leading to a dangerous political bent.

Two books have become almost cult classics among the academic left, and both reveal shocking ignorance of the most elementary level of economic logic. Thomas DiLorenzo explains.

Why didn't private entrepreneurs finance the moon program in the 1960s? Robert Murphy explains that the financial returns from such a project wouldn’t come close to covering the expenses, which is a market signal.

Neoclassical economists often make matters more complicated than necessary; but, fortunately, the best of them manage to stumble close

People are right to feel excluded, ignored, and otherwise ill-served by the political system. And yet what do the two parties do about this?