Mere Economics (Page 11)

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Mises Message

The pre-scientific mind distinguished between the good and the bad, the just and the unjust in human action. It believed that human behavior could be evaluated and judged by the established standards of a heteronomous moral law. It thought that human action was free in the sense of not being

The Progress Puzzle

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of Mere Economics, posted originally on my personal blog, A Fuller's Soap. Pieces That Don’t Fit: Slavery, Imperialism, and Colonialism Let’s start with pieces that don’t fit and aren’t part of the Progress Puzzle. Our ancestors

#FreeBookFriday: More "Mere Economics" Sources

John Meadowcroft (ed.), Prohibitions. Don't like something? Banning it may not be a very good idea, to put it mildly. Ludwig von Mises, Lots of Stuff. Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Economic Freedom and Interventionism, Human Action, Planning for Freedom, and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,

Diamonds are Forever - Time Preference

I'm posting a 14-part series of mini-essays on diamonds (but really about the economic point of view). Here's part 6. Time Preference Diamonds are forever. (Technically, diamonds aren’t indestructible. Nuclear blasts and hammers alike would render them liquid or dust, respectively—I asked a materials

Mere Economics Isn't - Ideology

In this series of posts, I'll describe five things that mere economics is not. Note, this post was written with Scott Burns and was originally published at The Independent Institute. Ideology Economics also isn’t an ideological discipline. Ideologies tell people what policies they should support to achieve

Four Ways to Get What You Want

This essay was originally published at the American Institute for Economic Research. How can you get what you want? Years ago, Clarence Carson pointed out that fundamentally, there are four ways, and Paul Cleveland and I explored this in a 2010 article in The Freeman. They are worth revisiting: You

Thankful for the Work and Savings Ethics

In a previous post, I suggested that the problems of our ancestors put our problems in perspective. That's true. But it's also incomplete. Studying economics, and specifically economic history, ought to generate gratitude. To make that point, I reposted an essay I originally published at The

Buchanan Broadside

The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in

Law and Economics Classics - Political Connections

At Grove City College, I teach Law and Economics--a course that explicitly examines how "people expand their options by cooperating." It therefore lies at the heart of "mere economics." In this sermon series, I'll be posting a summary of classic L&E papers

#FreeBookFriday: More "Mere Economics" Sources

Economic Freedom of the World: 2023 Annual Report. Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson. It's kind of wild that this is available online, gratis. It's a book-length elaboration on Frederic Bastiat's "What is Seen and What is Not Seen." Paul Heyne, Are