Mises Search

Reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the student of Austrian economics finds much to like. Taleb’s clear, razor-sharp and ruthlessly unqualified commentary often reminds the reader of Mises – indeed even the content of his ideas is sometimes strikingly Misesian. In exploring an argument, Taleb frequently follows it to its logical conclusion whether or

A famous adage of questionable origin reads something like this: you can fool all people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but never all people all of the time . The strand of modern economics called ‘ behavioral economics ’ makes its living on occasionally fooling some people and wrapping the results in daunting mathematical

In my previous post we saw some of the areas where Taleb’s writing is strikingly Misesian: the hidden value and emergent properties of spontaneous orders, the insightfully realistic view of uncertainty and risk-taking, and the aggressive despising of econometrics and other unproper uses of math in the domain of economics. So far the similarities.

A few years ago, I got very excited about pluralistic economic   thinking . In hindsight I realize that I was heeding the advice of two influential people whom I wasn’t more than briefly familiar with: the nineteenth-century British political economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill and the now ninety-year-old Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck .

In the same year that the Bank of England was created – 1694 – John Law became a fugitive. He killed a man in a duel, was thrown in prison awaiting execution, and escaped to Europe. After some years of gambling his way through the European courts and writing surprisingly prescient texts on monetary economics he landed in France. One of history’s

Listen to  the  Audio Mises Wire  version  of this article. These days, MMT—modern monetary theory—is all the rage. Most people , especially among those criticizing this ( post )modern way of looking at money and government spending, have focused on the macroeconomic parts of the illusive MMT promise. The gist of the MMT framework is that we can

In many years of lecturing at Mises University, Judge Napolitano has given the same—terrifying—ending to his introductory speech. Not until the horrors of this year did it dawn on me that perhaps his point has its basis in reality. The dear judge often mentions, almost like a joke, the libido dominandi— the desire to dominate, or the will to

Property is a key economic principle for markets to operate and their participants to live in harmony with one another. But as with so many things in the modern age, the  scene (and accompanying  meme ) from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride applies: “You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.” To the  Marxian ,

Anarchism [an·ar·chism] n.   1. “a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups” Merriam Webster The venerable British magazine The Economist has us worried in their May 11 issue titled “The New

In a previous article, I explored the absurdity of intellectual property, the unfair and inefficient monopoly privilege it confers on those savvy enough to play the legal system well. By being nonscarce, nonrivalrous objects like ideas or sound waves strung together in a specific order, they can’t be property economically speaking. Nobody can