Peter's Blog

Price Controls Can’t Make World Cup Tickets Affordable

Governments consistently believe they can outlaw the law of supply and demand, and Ontario’s price caps on World Cup resale tickets are only the latest example. The predictable result is not fairer prices but a black market, proving once again that intervention does not eliminate scarcity, it just pushes the exchange underground. The following article […]

Microsoft and the Protection Racket: Rothbard Was Right

Austrian economist Murray Rothbard famously described government as a large and successful criminal gang, arguing that it relies on coercion and violence to achieve its ends. The Microsoft antitrust case of the late 1990s illustrates this concept, as the government used its power to target a successful private company for alleged anticompetitive practices. By threatening […]

Jefferson, Hamilton, and Main Street

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton held fundamentally different beliefs about the relationship between Federal and local government. Jefferson held that the local government was the primary building block of the nation and that the federal government had the responsibility to protect rights and deal with administrative tasks such as defense and trade that would be […]

Stakes Higher Than Finance: Shylock and the Central Bank

The dramatic heart of the play, Merchant of Venice, centers around a deal that turns a bad financial decision into a matter much more serious than money. In a situation where the titular merchant, Antonio, seeks to help out a friend in a time of social need, Shylock the moneylender gives him a loan of […]

Why Are The Markets Wrong?

The role of the market as a creator and processor of information is central to Austrian economics. Prices should reflect the collective evaluation of everyone in the market as they utilize their own constrained resources. While the Austrian theory holds the market to be an important creator of information, it does provides a compelling answer […]

The Austrian Anthropology

Austrian economics does not reduce people to mechanisms like most other forms of economics do. While the Austrian perspective is still to approach economics as a positive rather than a normative science, it avoids numerous pitfalls by simply not making simplifying assumptions about people internally and the way they make choices. Rather than boxing people […]

The Fourth of July and Human Capital

Two hundred and fifty years ago, something unique happened, the people of a nation were able to step away from what had been and envision what a nation could be. The people and the governing structure had never been so intertwined. A deep understanding of the people was necessary to create this new framework of […]

Why Local Governments Can’t Stop The Spend

50 of the 75 largest US cities are currently operating with budget deficits. While 100% of American Federal Governments are operating with a budget deficit, the Federal Government faces constant scrutiny, but these cities avoid scrutiny even while in close proximity to the communities they overspend for. It would be far easier for people to […]

Don’t Blame Billionaires – Blame the Incentives

As wealth inequality continues to rise, many are quick to blame billionaires for society’s ills. However, focusing on individual wealthy people obscures the underlying institutional factors that shape economic outcomes. Rather than vilifying the rich, we should examine how government policies and central bank interventions create perverse incentives that concentrate wealth and distort markets. The […]

The Keynesian Demand Fallacy

Keynesian economists often attribute economic downturns to insufficient aggregate demand, arguing that government intervention is necessary to boost spending and restore growth. However, this theory fails to recognize that consumer demand is not an independent variable but rather a consequence of prior production and savings. The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. […]