Free Republic

Question: Hello Paul! Do you ever plan to present the ideas of economists that adhere to the Austrian School of Economics (Students of Von Hayek or Von Mises)? Their understanding of the nature and causes of the business cyle enabled them to foresee much of what has happened in the last few years. (Peter Schiff and Marc Faber are successful examples.) Thanks for your friendly commentary!Paul Solman: Yes, the resurgence of the Austrian School is worth a look, and was suggested to me by none other than Robert MacNeil a few weeks ago after Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky. Look...

Sarah Palin is one of the most intriguing (and polarizing) personalities to emerge on the national political stage in a long time. The way that many conservatives embrace her and many liberals vilify her illustrates in microcosm the yawning political divide in America today. We can draw insights about Palin's significance in America today from a trio of three markedly disparate historical figures: Ronald Reagan, the late Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and the Gospel of Matthew's King Herod. The connection between Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan is fairly simple and straightforward. They share conservative convictions and a special gift...

The doctors are, of course, the key figures of governmentalized medicine. The prime purpose is to procure their services and all that goes with them. Their honoraria alone, disregarding the dentists', constitute anywhere between nearly 50 percent (in Switzerland) and little more than 15 percent (in Britain) of the total cost. But far more is at stake. Being the focal point of medical procedures, the doctor directs the course. He decides who is sick and for how long, and thereby determines the trend of cash benefits, the quality and quantity of pharmaceutical products, the need for hospitalization, X-ray, laboratory, and...

"Contrary to popular myth, every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government's size, scope, or power--and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.

There are three things everybody knows when we talk trash: 1.We know we're running out of landfill space; 2.we know we're saving resources and protecting the environment by recycling; and 3.we know no one would recycle if they weren't forced to. Let's look at these three things we think we know. Are they real or are they rubbish? 1. Are We Running Out of Landfill Space? Two events created the perfect garbage storm in the late 1980s. One barge and one bureaucrat created this overhyped myth. The garbage barge was the Mobro 4000. The bureaucrat was J. Winston Porter. The...

Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists world-wide as he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s. We ignore the great Austrian at our peril today. Mises's ideas on business cycles were spelled out in his 1912 tome "Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel" ("The Theory of Money and Credit"). Not surprisingly few people noticed, as it was published only in German and wasn't exactly a beach read at that. Taking his cue from David Hume and David Ricardo, Mises explained how the banking system was endowed with the singular ability to expand credit and with it the money...

Mainstream economists dismiss the Austrians as cranks. Nobel economist Paul Samuelson wrote that "I tremble for the reputation of my subject" after reading the "exaggerated claims that used to be made in economics for the power of deduction and a priori reasoning [the Austrian methods]." (1) Noted economist Mark Blaug has called Austrian methodologies "so cranky and idiosyncratic that we can only wonder that they have been taken seriously by anyone Perhaps the defining difference between mainstream and Austrian economists lies in their opposing philosophies towards learning truth. Mainstream scientists use a well-developed process called the scientific method. This method...

The war between socialism and free market capitalism has been raging for almost 200 years – and far longer than that, if you toss aside those particular monikers and go straight to the ideological conflict that has pitted economic and financial entrepreneurs against collectivists since the dawn of human history. But never has the war been more pronounced – nor more critical – than in the current economic crisis in which the world finds itself mired.

In 1944, Ludwig von Mises published one of his least-known masterworks: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Drawing on his prewar experience in Vienna, watching the rise of the national socialists in Germany (the Nazis), who would eventually take over his own homeland, he set out to draw parallels between the Russian and German experience with socialism. It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They...

........Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party," recounts Reimann. "The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz's bakery and Herr Schmidt's butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state' if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly...

During the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Mikhail Gorbachev promoted the so-called "Third Way" as an alternative to free markets. This new way of governing would be neither capitalist nor communist, but something in between. In a similar vein, President Clinton said in his 1998 State of the Union address, "We have moved past the sterile debate between those who say government is the enemy and those who say government is the answer. My fellow Americans, we have found a Third Way." This Third Way calls for business and government to join hands as "partners." As Clinton told the Economic...

This is F.A. Hayek in 1975 on Meet the Press. If you have never listened to a Mises.org podcast before, you must listen to this. I heard this Friday and I've been haunted by it ever since. A number of points stand out to me. 1. Hayek is amazing here. He holds the line. He is patient and explains very well. He refuses to relent. The core of his message is rooted in the Austrian view of cycles, and this interview demonstrates that he never stepped away from it, despite some far-flung claims. 2. The line of questioning he endures...

When the CRA was created during the Carter administration, the administration also funded with tax dollars numerous "community groups" that have helped the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other federal regulatory agencies to enforce the act. Under the CRA, if a bank wants to make virtually any change in its business operations — merging, opening up a new branch, getting into a new line of business — it must first prove to regulators that it has made "enough" loans to the government's preferred borrowers. The (partially) tax-funded "community groups" like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)...

Prior to my last appearance on CNBC in October 2007, I had made more than 50 appearances on the network over the prior two years. In those segments, I repeatedly exposed the superficiality of our prosperity, described the American economy as a “house of cards”, pointed out that borrowing and spending were a ticking time bomb rather than a viable plan for long term economic health, and explained how investors could prepare for the tough times ahead. At the time, those forecasts were met with ridicule and led to my being nicknamed “Dr. Doom”. Now that these predictions have come...

On election day, 1976, the Libertarian party presidential ticket of Roger L. MacBride for President and David P. Bergland for Vice President amassed 174,000 votes in thirty-two states throughout the country. The sober Congressional Quarterly was moved to classify the fledgling Libertarian party as the third major political party in America. The remarkable growth rate of this new party may be seen in the fact that it only began in 1971 with a handful of members gathered in a Colorado living room. The following year it fielded a presidential ticket which managed to get on the ballot in two states....

Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later What an honor and a privilege it is for me to be delivering the Rothbard Memorial Lecture, here in the Mises Institute, the world center of Rothbardian thought. When I was first reading Murray Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty back in my college days, and arguing the merits of Rothbard's title-transfer theory of contract with my roommates (yeah, we were pretty geeky), I certainly didn't foresee that I would one day have the opportunity to pay tribute to him in such a venue. But I'm also struck, and a...

The term "liberalism," from the Latin "liber" meaning "free," referred originally to the philosophy of freedom. It still retained this meaning in Europe when this book was written (1927) so that readers who opened its covers expected an analysis of the freedom philosophy of classical liberalism. Unfortunately, however, in recent decades, "liberalism" has come to mean something very different. The word has been taken over, especially in the United States, by philosophical socialists and used by them to refer to their government intervention and "welfare state" programs. As one example among many possible ones, former US Senator Joseph S. Clark,...

The Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services. Thus, when I buy a newspaper from a news dealer for fifty cents, the news dealer and I exchange two commodities: I give up fifty cents, and the news dealer gives up the newspaper. Or if I work for a corporation, I exchange my labor services, in a mutually...

Dr. Peter Chojnowski In the market economy the individual is free to act within the orbit of private property and the market. His choices are final (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action). When we read this text from the founder of the Austrian school of economics and the grandfather of modern Neo-Liberalism1 (which manifests itself, in the United States, in the movements called Libertarianism and Neo-Conservatism), we are not surprised. Von Mises, a Jewish intellectual, but a practical atheist in his political philosophy, is concerned to render absolute, the only absolute (other than "market forces") he seems to acknowledge as having...

This is Mises's 1927 review of J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, Ideas on the Unification of Private and Social Economy (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1926), 40 pages, translated for the first time here (by Joseph Stromberg). It originally appeared as Mises, "Das Ende des Laissez-Faire, Ideen zur Verbindung von Privat- und Gemeinwirtschaft". Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft. 82(1927) 190-91. A review of a lecture given by John M. Keynes in Berlin. This text reproduces an address given by the English economist John Maynard Keynes on June 23, 1926, at the University of Berlin. It makes a...