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Every four years, Americans are encouraged and even guilted into the voting booths. It’s set up as a sacred ritual for which participation should count as an honor and a privilege. The mainstream push for our pilgrimage to our designated shrines of democracy on November 8th (or earlier for the especially pious) is based on a faulty assumption.

Noah Smith has acknowledged the failings of mainstream macroeconomics , but he says that none of the “outside ideas” offer a better replacement. He failed to mention the Austrian school, but we can still show how the Austrian tradition parries his criticisms with ease. 1. Quantitative Models Totally Miss the Nature of Human Action Smith dismisses

There’s a new bout of outrage over an expensive medicine or medical treatment. While the good in question changes each time, the blame always seems to fall on greedy corporations who just aren’t regulated enough. Free markets and capitalism are the scapegoat, even when nothing remotely resembling unhampered markets in health care is in place in

We need Mises now more than ever. The Federal Reserve is weighing which month to increase their target rate by a quarter of a percentage point, sending the media into a flurry whenever Janet Yellen so much as sneezes. As millions of US voters fall behind a self-avowed socialist, Venezuela’s socialist experiment is crashing and burning: Coca-Cola

In March of this year, the North Carolina state government passed legislation with at least two controversial components. The law requires that people use bathrooms according to what their birth certificate says regarding sex and it removes legal protections against sexual orientation discrimination at private firms. Government agencies are exempt

In a recent Bloomberg article , Noah Smith celebrates the increasing trend of empirical work in economics over the years. Purely theoretical papers are on the decline as a share of all published work. More and more economists are utilizing data to estimate the magnitude of various effects or to estimate specific parameters in theoretical models.

I made a small note in a previous article about how we shouldn’t worry about technology that displaces human workers: The lamenters don’t seem to understand that increased productivity in one industry frees up resources and laborers for other industries, and, since increased productivity means increased real wages, demand for goods and services

Listen to the MP3 audio version of this commentary . Jeff Deist has excellent advice for us: listen to dead economists . He explains how economics has lost its way by trying to emulate the physical sciences and their empirical method. He cites Menger, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard as primary resources for those interested in understanding economics

While the Federal Reserve has an explicit dual mandate to keep prices stable and maintain full employment, they have unofficially taken on new goals like maintaining financial stability. Bernanke, Yellen, and other officials have noted how traditional monetary policy is a limited and blunt tool to accomplish this goal, which is why the Fed has, in

“If steel and iron works, copper mines, and sawmills cannot be operated to their full capacity, the reason can only be that there are not enough buyers on the market ready to purchase their whole output at prices which cover the costs” wrote Ludwig von Mises in Human Action . Chairman Mao’s steel obsession In his first Five Year Plan (1953–57) and