Mises Wire

World Cup tickets are a hot commodity with prices through the roof. Naturally, governments want to do what governments always do unsuccessfully: levy price controls.

Lolcows, part of the world of internet personalities, would seem well beyond the world of economic analysis. Yet, much of what happens can be explained by the paradigm of Austrian economics.

Great Britain’s “Equality Act” is not simply a civil rights bill gone too far. It is, as Murray Rothbard would have put it, a “monstrous” piece of legislation that looks to create a social and economic equality that could never exist.

Keynesians claim that recessions occur because of a lack of consumer demand. However, demand comes from what we produce, so a growing economy needs more production.

Socialists claim that US billionaires are “running the country” by influencing politicians with their money, and the “solution” is to confiscate most of their wealth. But their wealth is not the problem; predatory government is.

Since abandoning socialism 30 years ago, Poland’s economy has grown, as one would expect with a market economy. However, there could be more economic freedom there that easily would translate into a booming economy.

Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of economics, served as the tutor for Austrian-Hungary’s Crown Prince Rudolf, the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph. But Rudolph’s untimely death in 1889 would end up changing the ruling dynamics of pre-World War I Central Europe.

Besides repairing the gaps in Misesian economics, Rothbard made numerous theoretical breakthroughs and discoveries of his own.

Austrian economics does not share the same methodology as we see in the economics mainstream. The Austrian emphasis on praxeology provides a better explanation of economic events than does the mathematically-bound mainstream.

In this week’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon takes apart Yale law professor Samuel Moyn’s screed against people living longer than Moyn thinks appropriate.