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Why Do We Have to Argue the Case for Free Trade?

I gave the following presentation at a fringe event during the Conservative conference in Birmingham. Human Co-operation and the Universal Division of Labour Adam Smith showed us, and it is not disputed internally within the nation, that specialisation in tasks has led to the explosion of the population and material prosperity.  One person the farmer, one the […]

Limited Purpose Banking?

In April, I reviewed Jimmy Stewart is Dead by Laurence Kotlikoff. Yesterday, Jerry O’Driscoll posted a review of his own: Chapter 1 of the book is titled “It’s a Horrible Mess,” and in it Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, reminds the reader of the breadth, depth, and horror of the global financial crisis. It is a […]

Is there room for Austrian Ideas at the top table?

In December 2008, Dr Anthony Evans and I wrote an article for the IEA asking, in these testing times for central banks, whether there is room for Austrian Ideas at the top table. Historically there have been roughly three main ideas that explain macroeconomic fluctuations, and they can be demonstrated with a brief (and highly stylised) overview. The first to emerge […]

The Richard Dawkins Delusion

Since the 2006 publication, by Bantam Press, of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion many commentators have critiqued it, largely for being an evangelical atheistic attack on religiosityand the mystical mind: The problem, for most commentators, seems to be the evangelical nature of Dawkins’s attack itself rather than the content of his argument. Indeed, I see more attacks on his style than I do […]

The Method of An Austrian Hedge Fund

The most “unpalatable” distinguishing mark that separates Austrians from the mainstream economists is the use of the a priori logical analytical method as opposed to the a posterioriempirical approach to working out the problems that economics poses to us. If you can reason from self-evident propositions and not contradict the laws of logic as you […]

The Madness of Red Ken

This is a tale of folly and destruction by a London socialist on the good people of London, how he imposed a distorted system of road pricing in the form of a new tax that is currently wreaking havoc on London enterprise. It is a tale that I hope never repeats itself on your side of […]