Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.] In the early 1950s, Mises’s NYU seminar dealt increasingly with epistemological questions. As he said to Ludwig Lachmann, he felt that the analysis of epistemological problems would be the number one task in the social sciences in the coming years.1 It was the topic of his last two monographs: Theory and History (1957) and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962). The...

Congress enjoys exorbitant political privilege in the form of cheap deficit spending—but it may soon come to an end. Original Article: “Rising Interest Rates May Blow Up the Federal Budget” In fiscal year 2020, at the height of covid stimulus mania, Congress managed to spend nearly twice what the federal government raised in taxes. Yet in 2021, with Treasury debt piled sky high and spilling over $30 trillion, Congress was able to service this gargantuan...

In the recent Wall Street Journal article “Inflation Surge Earns Monetarism Another Look,” Greg Ip writes that a recent surge in inflation is not likely to bring authorities to reembrace monetarism. According to Ip, money supply had a poor record of predicting US inflation because of conceptual and definitional problems that haven’t gone away. The head of the monetarist school, the late Milton Friedman, held that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary...

Systemic debt and deficit spending are intrinsic features of today’s economic system. Unlike classical economics, where markets play the leading role and governments the supporting one, the existing economic model, driven by Keynesian theory, has inverted the roles. Keynesian economics, like other statist economic theories, is distrustful of (free) markets, thus making the state, an inherently bureaucratic and coercive institution, the captain of economic and social...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a historic decision, upholding the highest principle of a republic. A republic is born through freedom of association in the same manner as individuals band together to form a family, families band together to make a community, and communities band together to make a society. In an ideal situation of law-based governance, the law givers and the law abiders must be the same, as it is only then that voluntary subservience to the law...

The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent recessions that people blamed on the lack of central banking. Not surprisingly, the post-Fed recessions have been worse. Original Article: “How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now” With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency...

1. Human Reason Reason is man’s particular and characteristic feature. There is no need for praxeology to raise the question whether reason is a suitable tool for the cognition of ultimate and absolute truth. It deals with reason only as far as it enables man to act. All those objects which are the substratum of human sensation, perception, and observation also pass before the senses of animals. But man alone has the faculty of transforming sensuous stimuli into...

It’s easy to see why, according to a new Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans said they do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election. As Americans face record gas prices and the highest inflation in 40 years, President Biden admits he could not care less. His Administration is committed to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Americans just need to suck it up. Last week a New York Times reporter asked Biden how long he expects Americans to pay record...

Black entrepreneurship in the United States has a remarkable history. Even during the inhospitable climate of Southern slavery, both enslaved and free blacks managed to establish lucrative ventures. Research on black entrepreneurship has revealed that in the Antebellum South black entrepreneurs’ pursuits spanned the entire gamut of industry, ranging from merchandising to transportation. Indeed, the success of some black entrepreneurs was so astounding that the demand...

Cause of the Boom-Bust Business Cycle The primary cause of the recurring “boom and bust” business cycle is central banks like the Federal Reserve creating money out of thin air. This was first explained by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises over a century ago. His student F.A. Hayek won the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this theory, which is now known as Austrian business cycle theory. The basic outline of Austrian business cycle theory is as...