Free Republic

I was raised to respect the Austrian School of economics. From the hardliners at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and Reason to the more moderate libertarians like Milton Friedman and President Reagan, the conservatives of my generation (I’m 62) knew several things with absolute certainty:· Taxation is Theft.· The most important goal of our Founding Fathers was limiting the size and scope of government.· The Invisible Hand of the Free Market delivers the best results for the consumer.At the same time, however, we recognized certain other fundamental truths of government:· Government is instituted to protect society from external enemies...

Breaking from tradition, the populist Freedom Party will not be given a chance to form a government despite winning last month’s elections. Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen announced Tuesday that incumbent Chancellor Karl Nehammer would be granted the chance to form a new government, despite his centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) coming in second place at 26 per cent of the vote behind the Freedom Party of Austria’s (FPÖ) 29 per cent. The 80-year-old president argued that even though tradition dictates that the winner be given the first crack at forming a coalition because the other parties have ruled...

VIENNA (AP) — A woman in Austria was found guilty of fatally infecting her neighbor with COVID-19 in 2021, her second pandemic-related conviction in a year, according to local media. A judge sentenced the 54-year-old on Thursday to four months’ suspended imprisonment and an 800-euro fine ($886.75) for grossly negligent homicide. The victim, who was also a cancer patient, died of pneumonia that was caused by the coronavirus, according to Austrian news agency APA. A virological report showed that the virus DNA matched both the deceased and the 54-year-old woman, proving that the defendant “almost 100 percent” transmitted it, an...

Two people were arrested in Austria for allegedly playing snippets of Adolf Hitler speeches over the loudspeaker of a train, which had at least one shaken Holocaust survivor onboard. Travelers on the train headed to Vienna heard audio of the Nazi dictator speaking along with recordings of supporters chanting “Heil Hitler!” during normal announcements Sunday. “We heard two episodes,” David Stoegmueller, a Green Party parliament member, told the BBC. “First, there was 30 seconds of a Hitler speech, and then I heard, ‘Sieg Heil!’ “ One of the passengers exposed to the Hitler diatribe was a concentration-camp survivor, he said.

Austrian police and army refuse to implement mandate sanctions. They will stand down!! If they stick to their word then the Austrian government will be in the big trouble. This is what is needed.. #NoVaccinePassports #NoVaccineMandates https://twitter.com/GillianMcKeith/status/1462108633966297090

A regional politician in Austria defended a plan to limit access to kosher meat, conditioning its sale on permits that would be individually issued to observant Jews. The Wiener Zeitung daily reported Tuesday about the draft decree in the state of Lower Austria, one of nine states that make up the federal Republic of Austria. Gottfried Waldhäusl, the cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Austria who is in charge of animal welfare and several other portfolios, defended the plan as necessary “from an animal welfare point of view.” *** The Wiener Zeitung did not say whether the draft...

MUSLIMS want to eradicate Christianity and conquer Europe - the Catholic cardinal tipped to be the next POPE has incredibly claimed. Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn gave the unexpected warning on Sunday during a special celebration for the Church festival "Holy Name of Mary". According to the Archdiocese of Vienna, the Cardinal said: "Will there be an Islamic conquest of Europe? Many Muslims want that and say: Europe is at its end." He asked God to have mercy on Europe and to show mercy to its people, which he said "are in danger of forfeiting our Christian heritage." Cardinal Schoenborn, who...

Last year Austria's largest bank, Erste Bank, sent shudders of Credit Anstalt through the European Banking System. This year it is Austria's 3rd largest bank that is scaring investors senseless. On the heels of the Swiss National Bank's decision to un-peg from the Euro, Raiffeisen Bank's Swiss-Franc-Denominated mortgage worries have resurfaced (along with Russian/Ukraine writedowns) and nowhere is that more evident than the total collapse of the bank's bonds (from over 95c to 65c today). Even after the ECB Q€ (and some apparent intervention to weaken the Swissy) bonds kept free-falling. Perhaps, The Freedom Party's demands for a bailout will...

Mar 08 2014 The WealthCycles Staff Once virtually abandoned by the mainstream, many ideas associated with Austrian School economics have been increasingly in the spotlight, and in the public consciousness, in recent years. Some of the attention resulted from the popularity of Congressman Ron Paul, who, particularly during his third presidential run in 2012, captured the attention of the millennials, the last generation born in the 20th century. The appeal of Paul’s anti-establishment economic theories is understandable: raised on expectations of upward mobility instilled in their baby boom parents, today’s young people have emerged into adulthood to face the sad...

<p>MILAN (AP) — Foreign ministry officials in Rome and Vienna confirm that names of two nationals listed on the manifest of the missing Malaysian airlines flight match passports reported stolen in Thailand.</p> <p>Italy's Foreign Ministry said Saturday that an Italian man whose name was listed as being aboard is traveling in Thailand and was not aboard the plane.</p>

BERLIN - The mayor of the Austrian town of Gföhl said on Tuesday in city council meeting that journalists who reported on asylum seekers should be hanged like the Jews. The Austrian news outlet Heute.at reported on Wednesday that Gföhl’s mayor Karl Simlinger expressed fury about asylum applicants who would be lodged in a planned complex. “I don’t give a shit about asylum seekers, but the journalists are to be blamed. They should be hanged; they are like the Jews.”

Video at link: A common belief is that conservatives caused the government shutdown, while liberals are the ones who want to legalize marijuana. But both ideas come from the same school of thought, which is much older than the Democratic and Republican parties. It is called Austrian Economics, and one of its leading proponents calls south Louisiana home. Dr. Walter Block holds an endowed chair at Loyola University and is a faculty member of the Mises Institute. He has taught at several universities and written books about controversial economic topics. He was one of many people angry about the recent...

Former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched his own K-12 home-school curriculum to provide an “education in liberty like no other.” The curriculum, which includes courses on “the economics of the Austrian school,” provides its K-5 program for free, meaning that students and families will be able to learn under Ron Paul for six years “without spending a dime,” according to one of the curriculum’s high school teachers, Ludwig von Mises Institute senior fellow Tom Woods. “Here, students learn the basics of Western Civilization and Western liberty — how it was won, how it is being...

The basic notion that more money, i.e., inflation, causes higher prices, i.e., price inflation, is not a uniquely Austrian view. It is a very old and commonly held view by professional economists and is presented in nearly every textbook that I have examined. This common view is often labeled the quantity theory of money. Only economists with a Mercantilist or Keynesian ideology even challenge this view. However, only Austrians can explain the current dilemma: why hasn't the massive money printing by the central banks of the world resulted in higher prices.

If Only D'Souza Were Right Mises Daily: Monday, September 03, 2012 by Gary North by Gary North 2016: Obama's America I went to see 2016: Obama's America. Dinesh D'Souza wrote, stars in, directed, narrates, and did the original research for it. If we look at this from the point of view of its success as a documentary, I think it is effective. It is making money in theaters. This is amazing for a documentary. It is a campaign-year documentary, and it is a good one. It is also dead wrong. That is because it misses the fundamental political fact of...

Keynesian (and some Monetarist) versus Austrian views on the business cycle revolve around two basic empirical issues: the nature of capital and production and the nature of the national budget constraint. Concerning capital: Ironically, Keynesians appear to assume a kind of “equilibrium always” story in which productive (human and physical) resources can, at low cost, be simply shifted to and plugged in to the production of whatever product or service happens to be the object of demand stimulus; and, further, that if enough of this is done, income, employment and tax-payments will rise precipitously. In this way economic-policy can produce...

Every once in a while, something comes along that perfectly encapsulates the idea of so-called "social justice" in action. For all the wonderful critiques that have been written about this wretched concept by its many detractors,[1] none quite match the elegant simplicity of a recent work by some of its advocates. I am referring here to a recent video made for the World Day of Social Justice[2] in which students and teachers complete this sentence: Everyone has the right to _____. The video is a colorful montage of possible completions to this sentence, set to some pleasant easy-listening music. It...

The main reason why so many state and local governments are bankrupt, or on the verge of bankruptcy, is the combination of government-run monopolies and government-employee unions. Government-employee unions have vastly more power than do private-sector unions because the entities they work for are typically monopolies. When the employees of a grocery store, for example, go on strike and shut down the store, consumers can simply shop elsewhere, and the grocery-store management is perfectly free to hire replacement workers. In contrast, when a city teachers' or garbage-truck drivers' union goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection...

LAST JUNE, Luigi Padovese, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of the Turkish port city of Iskenderun, was murdered in his home by a 26-year-old Muslim who stabbed him eight times in the heart and then severed his head while shouting “Allah is the greatest.” He is one of many priests murdered in Turkey since 2008. Here are words of appropriate outrage from Europe. Austrian MP Ewald Stadler, in a speech addressed to the Turkish ambassador last week, decries the Islamification of the West and the “romance of tolerance and human rights.” “Your devotion to freedom of religion is pure hypocrisy,” Stadler...

Nothing like hearing someone browbeaten in German to get the blood flowing:... I don’t know who this guy is. Maybe he’s part of some fringe party. I think what he says here is entirely defensible though. Islamists here in the US play the same game, demanding treatment their own home governments would never extend to any other religious minority.