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Book Review, Liberty Classics

Competition and Entrepreneurship: The Fountainhead of the Contemporary Austrian School

A Liberty Classic Book Review of Competition and Entrepreneurship by Israel Kirzner.1 The start of the 1970s was not the best time for the Austrian school of economics. Ludwig von Mises was past his productive years and would pass away in 1973. F. A. Hayek was still active but had turned much of his attention .. MORE

Article

Behavioral Versus Free Market Economics

In the late 1960s, the ideal of a society with free markets was definitively out of favor with the public. The Great War ended the “century of liberalism” (1815-1914), and the Great Depression pressed governments of all political stripes to intervene in the economy and to disengage from free trade. The Second World War then .. MORE

Book Review, Kling's Corner

In Search of Stable Money

Under a gold standard, government bonds are nearly free of inflation risk but not of default risk. Under a fiat standard, the reverse is true. ——White, Lawrence H. Better Money: Gold Fiat or Bitcoin? (pp. 214-215).1 In his new book, Lawrence H. White compares three possible monetary systems: a gold standard, a fiat money standard, .. MORE

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Economics of Health Care

RFK Jr. Conducted a Pointless Vaccine Purge

By David Henderson

Macroeconomics

Mission accomplished?

By Scott Sumner

Philosophy and Methodology

Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau

Regulation

My Weekly Reading for June 15, 2025

By David Henderson

Economic History

Back to the Seventeenth Century

By Pierre Lemieux

Monetary Policy

Seigniorage

By David Henderson

Business Economics

The Marvels of a Flight

By Marcos Falcone

Politics and Economics

The Me Decade

By Scott Sumner

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Lines, Legalism, Limits, and Likeness

By Kevin Corcoran

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

EconTalk #1000 (with Russ Roberts)

In honor of EconTalk’s 1,000th episode, host Russ Roberts reflects on his long, strange journey from pioneer of the podcast format to weekly interviewer of leading economists, authors, and thinkers. Hear him answer your–and Chat GPT’s–questions about why he got started, how he preps, and how he picks guests. He also explains why debate gave .. MORE

econtalk-podcast

John Taylor on Inflation, the Fed, and the Taylor Rule

What’s so bad about rising inflation? Why should we aim for a rate of 2 percent? Why is it a problem if interest rates are too low–and what do we mean by inflation, anyway? Stanford University’s John Taylor talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about these questions, the Taylor Rule, why inflation is rising, and what .. MORE

EconLog

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Monetary Policy

Seigniorage

In my June 10 post on the penny, I wrote: The U.S. government makes a pretty penny (pun intended) on seigniorage. It’s not as much as it used to be because more and more people use credit cards and even cryptocurrency to buy goods and services. Still, it’s a good amount. The biggest gain from .. MORE

Business Economics

The Marvels of a Flight

As I write this piece, I’m about to board an airplane. I’m in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but in just over 13 hours I’ll be in Zurich, Switzerland. In the 19th century, not even the wealthiest imaginable person would have been able to travel this quickly. Indeed, the entire wealth of the world could not have .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

Explore the lasting legacies and
continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Book Titles

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Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

By Ludwig Mises

IT GIVES me great satisfaction to see this book, handsomely printed by a distinguished publishing house, appear in its third revised edition. Two terminological remarks may be in order. First, I employ the term “liberal” in the sense attached to it everywhere in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. .. MORE

Elements of Political Economy

By James Mill

There are few things of which I have occasion to advertize the reader, before he enters upon the perusal of the following work.My object has been to compose a school-book of Political Economy, to detach the essential principles of the science from all extraneous topics, to state the propositions clearly and in their logical order, .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

Speculations on Origins and Endings: An Essay on The Essential UCLA School of Economics

By Michael L. Davis

An Essay and Book Review of The Essential UCLA School of Economics, by David R. Henderson and Steven Globerman.1 When you think about dinosaurs—which you should; dinosaurs are awesome—you always end up with the same two questions: where did they come from and where did they go? Yes, all life evolves through a process that .. MORE

Rules for Non-Radicals

By M. Scott King

A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, by Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan.1 Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan’s The Reason of Rules is remarkable. It is an important book, and the questions that the authors wrestle with are massive. When so much academic work feels as though it .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

A Conversation with Steve Pejovich

Svetozar “Steve” Pejovich, one of the most dynamic and insightful theorists writing on property rights, reflects on his experience in economics. With characteristic sagacity and humor, he demonstrates the power that empirical cases can bring to bear on theoretical problems. Born in Belgrade, Pejovich is Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, where he taught for .. MORE

VIDEO

A Conversation with Harold Demsetz

A professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and a primary figure in Chicago School Economics and in the field of Law and Economics, Harold Demsetz has contributed original research on the theory of the firm, regulation in markets, industrial organization, antitrust policy, transaction costs, externalities, and .. MORE

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Conversations with some of the most original thinkers of our time

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Guides

College Economics Topics

Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Economic History, Economic Regulation

Industrial Policy

National industrial policy is a rubric for a broad range of proposed economic reforms that emerged as a unified political program in the early eighties. Had they been passed, these reforms would have given government officials additional authority, as well as the necessary fiscal and regulatory powers, to directly alter the country’s industrial structure. Proponents .. MORE

The Economics of Special Markets

Sportometrics

Until recently, economists who analyzed sports focused on such things as the antitrust exemption, the alleged cartel behavior of sports leagues, and the player draft (see sports). Sportometrics is different. It is the application of economic theories to the behavior of athletes to explain what they do and to see if what they do can .. MORE

Corporations and Financial Markets , Economics of Legal Issues, Money and Banking, The Marketplace

Stock Market

The price of a share of stock, like that of any other financial asset, equals the present value of the sum of the expected dividends or other cash payments to the shareholders, where future payments are discounted by the interest rate and risks involved. Most of the cash payments to stockholders arise from dividends, which .. MORE

Quotes

As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.

-Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect- better because they alone give promise of final success.

-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>

The concept of capitalism is as an economic concept immutable; if it means anything, it means the market economy. One deprives oneself of the semantic tools to deal adequately with the problems of contemporary history and economic policies if one acquiesces in a different terminology.    

-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>