Joshua Mawhorter

Joshua Mawhorter is assistant editor of Mises.org. He was a summer fellow at the Mises Institute (2023) and a government/economics and US history teacher since 2016. Josh has a bachelor’s degree in political science from California State University, Bakersfield, a master’s in political science from Southern New Hampshire University, and a master’s in Austrian economics from the Mises Graduate School (2023). He has self-published a few books, including The First Constitution: The Articles of Confederation, Tyrannosaurus Debt: The Student Loan Crisis and How to Survive, and “An Austrian Critique of Modern Monetary Theory”, his thesis. He also enjoys teaching in the areas of theology, the Old Testament, church history, apologetics, and philosophy.

Articles

“Class” Analysis: Marx’s Shell Game

01/16/2025 Mises Wire Joshua Mawhorter

Though it is full of fallacies, so-called Marxian “class” analysis still pervades much popular and political discourse. This divisive worldview unnecessarily exacerbates conflicts between groups (so...

A Trick Question: How Many Times Have Nuclear Weapons Been Used?

01/09/2025 Mises Wire Joshua Mawhorter

Readers are doubtless familiar with the concept of a trick question, in which the asking of the question is meant to purposely mislead the answerer into a seemingly obvious, but wrong, answer. This...

World War I—The Great Banker Bailout

01/02/2025 Mises Wire Joshua Mawhorter

“Nobody could hate war more than I do.”— J. P. Morgan, Senate Munitions Committee “We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on...

Media

Slavery—Cronyism, Opportunity Cost, and Deadweight Loss

01/15/2024 Joshua Mawhorter

A modern misconception of antebellum slavery is that it “built the country.” Actually, the institution of slavery, economically speaking, was a deadweight loss to the US economy.

William Rawle and Secession

01/07/2024 Joshua Mawhorter

William Rawle was a well-respected lawyer, legal scholar, an abolitionist, and a believer in the right of states to secede. He described this in A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, which many claimed to have read while at West Point prior to the Civil War.

Understanding the Real Costs of Slavery: It’s Not Cheap labor

09/26/2024 Joshua Mawhorter

The standard belief is that slavery was about obtaining “cheap labor,“ yet nothing could be further from the truth. Slavery comes with high opportunity costs, which is why American slave owners depended upon several government regulations to subsidize their “peculiar institution.”