Mises Daily

Those who voted for the omnibus to avoid a shutdown fail to grasp that the consequences of blindly expanding government are far worse than the consequences of a temporary government shutdown.

The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, a bill with racist origins designed to increase the tax burden on non-whites in the United States, was passed 100 years ago today. It has since given birth to an immense police state apparatus.

The laws of physics can never be absolutely established. For some other law may prove more elegant or capable of explaining a wider range of facts. Hypotheses must be constantly tested. Economics is not like this.

"The Mises fellowship has been the single most important influence in my development as a scholar," writes Matt McCaffrey in his discussion on being an Austrian economist in academia today. "No other program could have given me the resources I needed to start my career."

In his new book The Forgotten Depression, James Grant, investor and founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, explores the Depression of 1921, a "forgotten" economic bust when the government failed to intervene, thus allowing the economy to cure itself.

While we are told today that an anarchist society is unachievable, the ancients believed such a society to be achievable but undesirable. The world would have to wait for later theorists like Bastiat and Oppenheimer, who explained the true costs of the state.

Knowing that money or gold cannot be used to provide a fixed measure of value, David Ricardo turned to the value of labor instead. But his labor theory of value has led to many errors including Marxism, land taxes, and much more.

If a customer consents to paying a certain price at the time of purchase, he cannot later claim that he was overcharged. The fact that he was charged the right amount is clear in the fact that he consented to the purchase in the first place.

If cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are being used as money, and if Carl Menger correctly tells us that money must have some kind of antecedent value, then as economists it becomes our job to discover what exactly is that antecedent value. A fresh reading of Menger's Regression Theorem provides several insights.

Sure, economists can use randomized controlled trials to learn more about why some people prefer red to blue, or why we eat junk food instead of vegetables. But this tells us little about the big problems of economics.