Mises Supported Fractional Reserve Banking

The bits of Mises Huerta de Soto forgot.

posted on 03 February 2011 by skirchner in Austrian School, Classical Liberalism, Economics, Monetary Policy

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Vernon Smith Prize for the Advancement of Austrian Economics

The European Center of Austrian Economics Foundation is calling for submissions for its 2nd International Vernon Smith Prize for the Advancement of Austrian Economics.  The essay topic is based on Schumpeter’s statement that ‘This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.  It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.’

Strangely, the ECAEF have overlooked the fact that a member of the prize jury is actually dead!

posted on 24 September 2009 by skirchner in Austrian School

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Bruno Does Austrian Economics

Austrian economics, Bruno-style:

The search for fame leads him to Ron Paul’s door. Brüno attempts to seduce him after being told that featuring in a sex tape will help his celebrity stock to rise…Ron Paul didn’t twig…that a TV interview that was supposed to be about Austrian economics might end in a candle-lit hotel bedroom, where a blond male journalist would proffer cheap champagne before attempting to seduce him. Never, in his wildest dreams, could the 73-year-old hero [sic] of the Republican right have envisioned that a predatory homosexual would have the gall to suddenly drop his trousers. That’s why Paul ran away shouting: “This is ENDED!”

posted on 04 May 2009 by skirchner in Austrian School

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In Search of the Real Austrian School

Time magazine’s economics columnist Justin Fox goes in search of the real Austrian School:

People in the U.S. who self-identify as believers in Austrian economics, though, tend to follow a much narrower path, that of Mises and his American disciple Murray Rothbard. They are extremely libertarian (at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, a libertarian group organized by Hayek in 1947, Mises stormed out saying “You’re a bunch of socialists”). They yearn for a return to the gold standard. Many possess a near-religious conviction that their beliefs are correct and that all other economic theories are pure folly. Some of them—I’m thinking here mainly of the crowd around Lew Rockwell—combine these beliefs with far loopier stuff. Others—such as financial pundits Peter Schiff and Michael Shedlock—often let their rabid Austrian leanings overpower (and, to my taste, ruin) otherwise trenchant economic analyses. Am I going to go to these people for perspective on the business cycle or Austrian economics? No, I don’t think so.

On the other hand, I’m not going to do like Krugman and dismiss Austrian economics as “about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire.” Just because something is outside the mainstream doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I guess the best thing for me to do would be for me to read more of the source material myself. I’ve dabbled in Hayek and Schumpeter and even Rothbard. If I devoured all of Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, in German, that ought to give me a certain authority, right?

That’s not going to happen anytime soon, so I’ll keep relying on Tyler Cowen. I will also try to follow Ransom’s advice, though. Roger Garrison of Auburn and Steve Horwitz of St. Lawrence University, the two modern Austrian-school economists he recommends, seem on first examination to be more interesting than loopy or strident, so I’ll start looking out for their writings. First step, adding the Austrian Economists blog, to which Horwitz contributes, to my feed reader.

posted on 02 January 2009 by skirchner in Austrian School, Economics

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