Mises Search

Noah Smith has a  new Bloomberg column  titled, “Milton Friedman Got Another Big Idea Right.” Specifically, Smith points to a new paper that apparently confirms Friedman’s famous “plucking model” of recessions. Here’s how Smith contrasts Friedman’s theory from others, including the  Misesian  theory of boom-bust: Some [business cycle] theories

Listen to  the  Audio Mises Wire  version  of this article. This year has been a slow-motion train wreck on many levels. Americans have understandably been so preoccupied with the election and the unprecedented violations of individual liberties in the name of fighting covid-19, that there hasn’t been much attention left for what the Federal

[This selection is adapted from ” The Labor Theory of Value: A Critique of Carson’s   Studies in Mutualist Political Economy ,”   Journal of Libertarian Studies  20, no. 1 (2006). Please see original for full references and footnotes.] Before proceeding, we should be clear on what an economic theory of value is supposed to do: its task is simply

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. There is arguably nothing more sacrosanct to today’s elites than “democracy”—by which they mean “a political outcome we endorse.” And yet ironically, one of the most surprising and powerful results in social choice theory, namely Kenneth Arrow’s so-called impossibility theorem, shows that

Many economists who subscribe to some version of the Phillips Curve have been puzzled by the tepid nominal wage growth in recent years, even though the official unemployment rate has collapsed and we should be in “overheating” territory at this point. (This same, falsified framework led Krugman back in 2010 to warn of impending price de

Supporters of carbon taxes like to tell Americans  not to worry , that people warning about “Big Government” are scaremongers, and that we can certainly trust political officials to calibrate taxes based on the scientific recommendations of economists in white lab coats. Yet  recent news  out of British Columbia shows just how aggressive the

[This article is part of the  Understanding Money Mechanics  series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.] In addition to the Keynesian perspective (covered in chapter 15), a relatively new challenge to the Austrian framework comes from the “market monetarists” and their endorsement of a central bank policy of

[This article is part of the  Understanding Money Mechanics  series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.] In a modern primer on money mechanics, it is necessary to provide at least an introduction to Bitcoin.     Consequently, in this final chapter we will first give a basic explanation of what Bitcoin is and how

[This article is part of the  Understanding Money Mechanics  series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.] In chapter 10 we explained the connection between monetary inflation and price inflation, and warned that there is no simple one-to-one relationship. This fact has been very relevant in the wake of the various

[This article is part of the  Understanding Money Mechanics  series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.] In chapter 9 we presented Ludwig von Mises’s explanation of how bank credit expansion causes the boom-bust cycle, what is now known as Austrian business cycle theory. However, the reigning view today in both