Economics

Thomas Nixon Carver on the Economics of Conflict versus Cooperation

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2023

Human beings have had two fundamental ways of associating with each other: conflict or cooperation. Both methods have run through all recorded human history, as well as long before human beings left intelligible residues of their actions to be deciphered by those who came after them. Group conflicts have seemed to have a variety of causes: religious, political, linguistic, ...

George Goschen on Laissez-Faire and the Dangers of Government Interference

by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 2023

The counterrevolution against the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century has been at work for more than 150 years. In the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, the triumph of a philosophy of individual rights and liberty, impartial rule of law, private property, freedom of trade and enterprise domestically and in international relations, and attempts to mitigate, if not end, wars ...

Celebrating Adam Smith on His 300th Birthday

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2023

Three hundred years ago, on June 5, 1723, one of the most important and influential thinkers in modern history, Adam Smith, was born in the small Scottish village of Kirkcaldy. There are few individuals who it can be said have left as lasting and as positive a legacy on humankind as Adam Smith. He authored only two books, The Theory ...

Philip Wicksteed on the Common Sense of Choice and the Market Process

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2023

The British economist Philip H. Wicksteed began his most important work, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), with a motto taken from the famous German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): “We all live it, but few of us know what we are living.” Contrary to the classical economists, who had argued that the market value of things was ...

The Life and Significance of F. A. Hayek

by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, (University of Chicago Press, 2022) People who knew Friedrich A. Hayek before he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 sometimes said that he went through bouts of depression that interrupted his research and writing. Some also said that he could be aloof and distant when ...

Lionel Robbins on the Logic of Choice and a Liberal International Order

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2023

It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that British economist Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) was one of the most influential economists of the last hundred years without most economists, nowadays, being aware of it. This is all because of a relatively short book that he published over 90 years ago, An Essay on the Nature and ...

Now That Inflation Is Back, Here’s the Book to Read

by George Leef August 1, 2022

Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It by Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames (Encounter Books, 2022). We have been through this many times before — prices start to increase at an accelerating pace and consumers grumble about inflation, while politicians try to pin the blame for it on parties other than ...

The Centenary of Ludwig von Mises’s Critique of Socialism

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2022

At a banquet dinner held in New York City on March 7, 1956, honoring the famous Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, another equally renowned member of the Austrian school of economics, Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered a talk highlighting the important contributions of his long-time mentor and close friend, going back to when they first met in the Vienna of ...

Political Paternalism, Not Free Markets, Cause Economic Shocks

by Richard M. Ebeling April 29, 2022

One of the political paternalist tricks is to insist that any economic policy failure is more “proof” of the bankruptcy of the market economy. Once again, this worn-out device is employed by Columbia University professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. Any and all such presumed market “failures” are placed by Stiglitz under the umbrella term, “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism has ...

Can Capitalism Survive? 80 Years After Schumpeter’s Answer

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2022

Eighty years ago, in the midst of the Second World War, Austrian-born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published one of his most famous books, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). A central question that he asked and tried to answer was, “Can Capitalism Survive?” His basic conclusion was, “No, I do not think it can” (p. 61). He was (forlornly) confident ...

Ludwig von Mises’s Free Market Agenda for a Postwar Ukraine

by Richard M. Ebeling March 14, 2022

Our television screens and social media sites are filled with the images of death and destruction as the Russian army continues its devastating advance into Ukraine. How long this will go on, and with what human and material costs is still not known. But for the Ukrainian people and their country’s economy, the world is, truly, being turned upside ...

Inflation Nation

by Scott McPherson January 12, 2022

Almost a year ago, Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary, warned that pumping trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy could have terrible consequences. He told Democrats that they were taking “substantial risks” in passing the so-called American Rescue Plan (ARP), possibly creating “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Summers was patronized and mocked ...