From 1820 to 1914, the classical gold standard provided the monetary foundation for one of the greatest economic transformations in history. Stable prices, disciplined credit, and broad trust in long-term savings enabled railroads, canals, telegraphs, electricity, and...
With Donald Trump furiously, ineptly, and fraudulently campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, it may interest liberals—the classical variety, libertarians—to know that the first Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1901, was shared by one of their own. This was a man who...
With silver recently touching record highs, now is the perfect time for looking back to the last time silver traded at such levels—for it is a highly instructive case study, particularly when reinterpreted through an Austrian lens. The story of Nelson Bunker Hunt,...
In the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, the dumbed-down human population five-hundred years into the future have replaced water in drinking fountains with the salty sports drink “Brawndo,” and have even begun to water farm crops with Brawndo. Facing a nationwide...
A recent article in Fortune speaks to a computer scientist named Andrew Chien who asserts that the new wave of OpenAI data centers will be consuming as much energy as New York City and San Diego combined when they are operating at full capacity during extreme weather....
In a recent interview with Nathan Goodman of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Professor Michael Clemens, a GMU specialist in migration economics, put forth "a strange and striking fact about the world economy." A lower-skilled person's location in the...
With Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve beginning a cutting cycle, it is worth revisiting why the Feds manipulation of interest rates is not a harmless (if misguided) technocratic tool for attempting to “fine-tune” the economy, but is instead a source of deep...
“We candlemakers are suffering from the unfair competition of a foreign rival, whose production costs are so low that he floods our market with light at a price far below ours…This rival is none other than the sun.”- Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1845) Frédéric...
