Although much of the debate between Hayek and Keynes is today portrayed in terms of policy differences, those are not the most fundamental divisions between their conceptions of economics. I argue that their economics diverges most significantly in how they understand the role of capital in a...

The belief that American middle class economic well-being has stagnated, if not declined, is common place in the media and among many pundits. However, the economic data on what sorts of goods are actually in the households of American families suggest that life has never been better, both for...

This paper honors Don Lavoie's work on the relationship between theory and history in Austrian economics by using the current recession as an example of many of the ideas found in his paper on the “Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” More specifically, I start from the premise that all...

The Chicago-Virginia tradition of political economy has rejected both competitive money production and money's politicization via post-constitutional bargaining, opting instead for constitutionalization. This paper provides a constitutional political economy of the costs of inflation and argues...

Politicians and pundits portray Herbert Hoover as a defender of laissez faire governance whose dogmatic commitment to small government led him to stand by and do nothing while the economy collapsed in the wake of the stock market crash in 1929. In fact, Hoover had long been a critic of laissez...

In their recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Bagus and Howden (2010) present “quibbles” with fractional reserve free banking. Or specifically, what they call “unaddressed issues” in this system, with a particular emphasis on Selgin (1988). We deem their...

The UK government - in common with the governments of many Western countries - is in the midst of implementing policies to reform education. However, the government has, as a matter of principle, decided that profit-making schools cannot provide state-funded education even if they would lead to...