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Curt Carlson, the world’s leading authority on innovation and how to implement it, worries that the US is under-performing on this front – badly.  On LinkedIn,  he writes : Almost all measures of innovative performance today are wanting.  Only 3% of patents recoup their investment; the rest are mostly waste that costs many tens of billions of

Big Tech. Big Pharma. Big food. Big banks. Big oil. We’ve got questions about all of them. Big Tech is surveilling us and stealing our privacy. Big Pharma is exploiting us and poisoning us. Big food is compromising our health and fitness. Big banks are destabilizing boom-and-bust machines. Big oil is destroying the planet. Do we need them? In the

Is there any hope in the Western World that individual citizens can win some release from the relentless and imprisoning growth of government? In the US, government spending , a reasonable proxy for their power over us, increases every year, except for a few minor blips. The citizens’ situation becomes more and more dire. We have precious little

The role of the entrepreneur is central to Austrian economics. Entrepreneurs are the coordinators of individual human action in the context of subjective knowledge and dispersed information. There are two critical individual roles for economic dynamism. The first is consumer sovereignty: the consumer is boss, because they determine what is

We are told that elections are important, but the most powerful state institution, the central bank, is totally out of reach of the voter. Ludwig von Mises viewed democracy as a utilitarian concept. It was the form of political organization that allowed the majority to change the government without violent revolution. In Socialism , Mises writes

In an address delivered at the recent Mises Institute conference in San Diego, Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne posited that classical liberalism is the operating system for Western Civilization. It is an operating system based on consent: in this OS, free people make free choices to advance their individual interests, and evolve sub-systems of

Ludwig von Mises was careful to establish the individual actor as the basis for all economic analysis. An individual acts to improve his circumstances. To do so, he chooses among various available means in order to achieve his ends. Those ends are based on his individual values, which are subjectively established. Methodological individualism and

Jeff Deist recently penned a metaphorical comparison of Austrian economics to the punk rock bands of the 70’s and 80’s who composed, created, and played but were denied recognition because they were locked out by the music industry establishment. They developed a do-it-yourself ethic when it came to publishing and touring and promotion; they

In a recent episode of the Economics for Entrepreneurs podcast, I interviewed Steve Mariotti, who has spent a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship to kids from difficult and troubled backgrounds in the US, as well as the sons and daughters of parents who lived through the USSR and Vietnamese communist regimes. He portrayed entrepreneurship as an

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Economists and Wall Street analysts are using the word recession to describe the looming plunge in output in the US economy. We’ll just make the point early that economists, exhibiting the typical emptiness of their failed science, can’t even agree on the  definition  of recession. Undeterred