Voting: The Seen and the Unseen

The example you set for your children and friends by voting to place a warmonger, a redistributionist, or any other rights violator (or anybody, really) into an inherently destructive office at the head of an inherently destructive hyper-state has impacts that will propagate throughout society and posterity like ripples in a pond, and will be far more significant than any direct impact it has on the election at hand.

Read more

Horwitz's Misreading of Mises

Horwitz's error is to think that, if you introduce assumptions to your theorizing because of experience, that makes the result "empirical" or "applied theory." But that is not the case. For the truth of a theory, it makes no difference why it was constructed the way it was (that is to say, why it includes the assumptions it does). A self-contained theorem is true or false based on its logical structure, regardless of whether the assumptions are introduced because of experience, because of pure fancy, or for any other reason.

Read more

The Brilliance and Bravery of Mises

"Throughout his career Mises was ever the picture of principled intransigence. An intellectual Leonidas, surrounded by hordes of socialists, fascists, money cranks, and neoliberals, he stood his ground. Even as old allies — like those swept up in the Keynesian Revolution — fell away, still he stood his ground. Still he fought. And he fought not only for the sake of future generations, but for the sake of his own.

For Mises, it was not enough to theoretically expose the folly of inflationism in The Theory of Money and Credit, a book for the ages. He also personally fought the inflationism present in interwar Austria, using his influence to save his homeland from the hyperinflation that would soon after befall Weimar Germany and contribute toward the rise of Nazism.
For Mises, it was not enough to theoretically prove the madness of socialism in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, another book for the ages. He also personally dissuaded the most powerful man in Vienna from imposing on that city the Bolshevism that would soon after lead to famine in Russia.
Mises's efforts probably saved the lives of thousands — and the livelihoods of millions."

Read more

The 99 and the 1

Whatever one thinks of the current plight of the 99%, throughout almost all of history, things were much worse for the vast majority of the population. In precapitalist ages, the average member of the economic 99%, if lucky enough to survive infancy, was consigned to a life of back-breaking work and poverty, constantly on the verge of famine, disease, and death.

The only individuals who did not have such a wretched life were the "1%" of old. This economic 1% was virtually identical with the state. It was made up of the French kings, the English lords, the Roman senators, the Egyptian viziers, and the Sumerian temple priests. The members of this elite lived in Olympian splendor: servants at their beck and call, as much food as they could possibly want, spacious homes, an abundance of jewelry, and a tremendous amount of leisure time.

Read more

The Measurement Chimera

While, after the advent of modern value theory, most economists accepted that valuation is not objective, and thus not cardinal, they just could not let go of cardinality altogether. Cardinality is necessary for the use of measurement and mathematics, and according to the prejudice of many thinkers, "science is measurement."

 

Read more

The Mystery of the Marginal Pairs

The great Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk considered the supply-and-demand formulation as all well and good, but he discovered that prices are determined more directly by something else.

In any given market for a good, there will always be four people whose valuations put them in a special position. Böhm-Bawerk called these four people the "marginal pairs." It is these marginal pairs that directly determine prices.

Read more

Two's Company: The Basics of Property

Hume went on to suppose that in this situation every person's natural beauty is such that he has no desire for adornment, that the weather is so mild that he has no need for clothing, that all around him wild plants bear in abundance the most delectable food and natural springs spill out in profusion the most delicious beverages.

Hume argued that in such a paradise, the human conventions of property and justice would be entirely useless.

Read more