Reprising this post from when I enjoyed George Selgin’s Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 (University of Michigan Press, 2008). Come the Industrial Revolution, the number of wage earners rose dramatically, increasing dramatically the need for small denomination coins to pay them and for them to […]
Private coins and the Industrial Revolution Read More »
Review of Leonidas Zelmanovitz,The Ontology and Function of Money: The Philosophical Fundamentals of Monetary Institutions Lexington Books, 2015, 447 pp.Reviewed by Stephen HicksFirst published at Law and Liberty, edited by Richard Reinsch and Lauren Weiner. Money is funny, the old saying goes, both in the cognitive puzzles it generates and the motivational extremes of human
Review of Zelmanovitz on the philosophy of money Read More »
A cliché response to calls for a fully free society: But who will build the roads?!? Road networks seem an obvious case where only governments can (a) envision an infrastructure project of national scope, (b) tax millions of people to get the capital needed, and (c) compel or confiscate land from recalcitrant owners to put
Friedrich Engels answers: Who will build the roads? Read More »
[I’m re-posting this good discussion from 2012 at Cato Unbound.] An instructive trio of essays by economists at Cato Unbound about Austrian economics’ reputation — especially Mises’s praxeological version — for being strongly a priori rationalist: Is Austrian economics anti-empiricist? Steve Horwitz says no. Bryan Caplan says yes. George Selgin also says yes. To Selgin’s
Is Austrian economics anti-empirical? (Horwitz, Caplan, Selgin, and Boettke) Read More »
An instructive trio of essays by economists at Cato Unbound about Austrian economics’ reputation — especially Mises’s praxeological version — for being strongly a priori rationalist: Is Austrian economics anti-empiricist? Steve Horwitz says no. Bryan Caplan says yes. George Selgin also says yes. To Selgin’s series of quotations from Mises, I’d add this one from
Are Austrian economists anti-empirical? Read More »
Links to my posts over the last three years on the causes of the crisis. This is an ongoing project, and I’ll add new items to the Financial Crisis page as they are posted. Ten posts: 1. What is the US economy? Introduction. Before blaming the economic crisis on either government regulation or free enterprise,
Collected posts on the financial crisis Read More »
I attended a two-day conference at Wake Forest University on the Federal Reserve. The Fed is the U.S. central banking system and was founded in 1913 to replace the earlier National Banking System experiments that had been in place since the eighteenth century. I enjoyed a paper presented by George Selgin (University of Georgia) and
Has the Federal Reserve been a failure? Read More »