You have left your house for a walk. You intend to pass through some woods on your way to town to meet a friend. After about 25 minutes of walking, however, you stop, puzzled. The trail through the woods should have put you in town several minutes ago. What happened? Suddenly, you remember the fork in the trail by the big chestnut tree. You always
Special-interest-group pleading often tries to hide behind supposedly economic arguments. It is important to debunk such arguments as they arise, so that the interest-group politics can be seen for what it is. So, in the spirit of Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms , I offer the following. There Is a Shortage of Programmers. Many advocates of government
>Many large brokerage houses, as well as small boutiques, rely heavily upon mathematical models in their day-to-day trading. Clearly, there is a market for this kind of modeling, yet Austrian economists have generally held the view that the neoclassical, mathematical approach to economics is a strictly limited approach. How can we reconcile the
Choice is choice between alternatives, and these alternatives must be distinguishable or they are not alternatives; moreover, one must in some way present itself as more attractive than the other, or it cannot be chosen. -- R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature , p. 41 Bryan Caplan, in his widely circulated web article, “ Why I Am Not an Austrian
Click Here to view the online video version of this lecture in WMV format. Human interactions can be located on an axis running between two polar ideas, persuasion and aggression. I am not contending that this is the only way we can evaluate human action, only that it is a useful way. What do I mean by persuasion? Basically, this: When engaging
Some freedom-minded people pin their hope for liberty on withdrawing from an unfree world. In times of crisis, such as wars and recessions, this idea gains popularity. We might refer to this notion as “economic secession,” borrowing the name from John Kennedy’s article of the same title . Despairing of advancing the cause of liberty in society at
The starting point of praxeology is not a choice of axioms and a decision about methods of procedure, but reflection about the essence of action. — Ludwig von Mises, Human Action , II.3 Several times recently, I have found myself engaged, directly or indirectly, in discussions about exactly what implications follow from the fact that humans act.
Jane Jacobs is one of those intellectuals who seem ever on the periphery of the libertarian movement. Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , can be found on the shelves of many a libertarian, though often unread. Perhaps this is because her name tends to be associated with leftish intellectuals who decry the rise of the suburbs
The quantitative treatment of economic problems must not be confused with the quantitative methods applied in dealing with the problems of the external universe of physical and chemical events. The distinctive mark of economic calculation is that it is neither based upon nor related to anything which could be characterized as measurement. --
While listening to New York City’s CBS News Radio the other day, I was struck by the juxtaposition of two stories, apparently placed together without ironic intent. The first one was about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg visiting Staten Island to gripe about the “overdevelopment” of the borough. In his recorded remarks (I quote from memory here),
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.