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Consider the market for aluminum and the general tariff of 25% that the US administration has planned to impose on all American importers of this metal starting March 12 (compared to a current tariff of 10% that hits fewer aluminum products and exempts some countries including Canada and Mexico). A very good starting point for .. MORE
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International Macroeconomics
In a recent interview, Tyler Cowen asked me why China doesn’t end its deflation by devaluing the yuan. I suggested that it might be due to pressure from the US. A recent Bloomberg article provides support for that claim: In fact, the PBOC has been fending off depreciation pressure on the yuan since Trump won .. MORE
International Macroeconomics
One of the best decisions I made in the early 1990s was to get Herb Stein to do a piece on the balance of payments for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, which was then The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. His first two paragraphs are still beautiful: Few subjects in economics have caused so much confusion—and .. MORE
Adam Smith
The mouse smiled brightly It outfoxed the cat! Then down came the claw, And that, Love, was that -Lyrics to a lullaby recited by the devil Raphael Commenting on a recent post by Scott Sumner, Mactoul argued “Authoritarianism is useful when you are trying to downsize the federal bureaucracy.” This sort of love affair .. MORE
Competition
On February 14, I received an email from Alexa DiFrancesco, a producer at the government-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She wrote, in part: I’m reaching out because my team is working on a Canada-US call-in show between 4 and 6pm ET (2pm and 4pm MT) on Sunday, Feb 23rd. It will be carried on NPR, CBC and .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Even though I like the broad brush-strokes of Reno’s ideas, as I mentioned in my previous post, I think there are important points where Reno goes wrong. First of all, while Reno (to his credit) acknowledges that the banishing of the strong gods was motivated for good reasons, and in response to real horrors, he .. MORE
Labor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
At one time, most Americans were farmers. By late 20th century, the vast majority of farmers had moved to the city for jobs in manufacturing and services. More recently, China is going through the same sort of transformation, as hundreds of millions of people move from the countryside to the city. This has contributed to .. MORE
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Browse our archive of posts by author last nameAustrian Economics
For the last 20 years that I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, I always covered, in every course I taught, Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge and Society,” American Economic Review, September 1945. It’s well worth reading. Russ Roberts’s recent EconTalk interview of Peter Boettke, “Who Won the Socialist Calculation Debate?,” .. MORE
Liberty
Matt Taibbi: The Collapse of the Censorship Regime Interview by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe, “Just Asking Questions,” Reason, February 27, 2025. Excerpt: The Department of Homeland Security…has this concept, you know, they call it building resilience on the one hand, or pre-bunking on the other, which is this idea of introducing a potentially controversial or difficult idea to .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
In the previous posts of this series, I have simply been describing the ideas R. R. Reno lays out in his book The Return of the Strong Gods, attempting to put the case in terms I think Reno himself would agree accurately represents his ideas. At this stage, I’ll be adding my own thoughts to .. MORE
Polities and Economics In the first article of this series, I outlined what an economic approach to reading Homer’s epic, The Odyssey,1 might look like. I then turned to Homer’s treatment of comparative political regimes in the second article. In this final essay, I return briefly to The Odyssey’s polities, and then consider the lessons the heroic tale .. MORE
Leo Tolstoy. This article was inspired by a recent Virtual Reading Group on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, led by Richard Gunderman. Learn more about our Virtual Reading Groups at the Online Library of Liberty. Productivity is a measure of efficiency, tending to focus on the relationship between inputs (number of workers or hours worked) and .. MORE
A Liberty Classics Book Review of What Should Economists Do? by James M. Buchanan.1 In November 1963, James Buchanan–newly president at the 33rd meeting of the Southern Economic Association–gave a stirring and surprising address titled “What Should Economists Do?”2 It was immediately published in the January 1964 issue of the Southern Economic Journal. The address .. MORE
It was Don Lavoie, not Friedrich Hayek, who coined the term “knowledge problem” in his seminal 1985 National Economic Planning: What Is Left?1 (itself a more accessible and policy-focused distillation of Lavoie’s thesis, under Israel Kirzner, entitled Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered). Lavoie reformulated and clarified the knowledge problem as developed .. MORE
The first statement is true. If the customer is indifferent between becoming a member and not becoming one, it means that the total cost should be the same for both options. In this case, the..
Ana Cecilia Carvalho, February 27