Mises Search

Happiness, thy name is coffee. In today’s edition of “The Calling,” Steve Horwitz highlights the glory of the Keurig coffee maker, which represents a real step forward for coffee drinkers everywhere that isn’t fully captured by standard measures of well-being like Gross Domestic Product. For more on the same, here’s Jeffrey Tucker’s take on the

I was in a Christian bookstore earlier today and noticed a couple of titles ringing alarm bells and tying fears of economic collapse and the end of oil to end-times prophecy. One of the reasons I love economics is that it forces us to be honest with ourselves about our beliefs. The well-worn objection to the “we’re going to run out of oil” thesis

My most recent Forbes piece explains how to use the economic way of thinking to ruin Christmas . In this light, I found Steven Landsburg’s take on Yoram Bauman’s claim in the New York Times that economics increases Grinchiness especially interesting. I haven’t read Bauman’s underlying paper, but in his NYT summary he points out that economics

I’ve been intrigued by the Occupy movement and have written a number of articles and posts on it for Forbes and the Mises Blog . I see this as a teachable moment: a lot of people are angry, but their anger is misdirected. The problems that have them so exercised are the faults not of free markets, but of the rent-seeking society that, if I may be

I spent a good chunk of yesterday grading in the library at the University of Memphis. My goal was to lash myself to the mast long enough to get through a few stacks of assignments, and as I can’t access the wireless network at UM, their library seemed ideal (incidentally, I was grading assignments in which students were to evaluate Thaler and

I write this from the playground at a McDonald’s just off of Interstate 81 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where we’ve just finished a predictable McDonald’s lunch and are burning some restless energy before getting back in the car. It has me thinking about some of the most important implications of free markets: we don’t have to know one another’s

I’ve said before that being a father has made me a better person and a better economist. Over the summer, it taught me (in a very vivid way) that value is subjective. My three-year-old son loves his stuffed panda, Gerard. Gerard was a gift from a friend; I didn’t realize how much Gerard had cost, but it turns out that to get another, identical

I’ve posted a couple of times on economics lessons I’ve learned from my kids. Here’s a post from Monday in which I explain subjective value , and here’s another post in which I explain how kids are apparently born Keynesians . I’ve learned a lot from Jacob (age 3) and Taylor Grace (age 1.5), but their share of responsibility is about to get much

The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. Roger Garrison’s lecture on The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle is indispensable, and I was pleased to see that his lecture “ Keynes and Hayek: Head to Head ” is also available on YouTube. Here, in a few words, is a brief summary of what the Austrian Theory of

Jeff’s post below inspired some lively discussion. I think that those who Steve Horwitz calls “one-drop libertarians”–those for whom a single drop of association with the state is cause for immediate dismissal of anything that is otherwise a manifestation of free market forces–are missing the point in a couple of ways. First, consider Las Vegas.