We wish to "quibble" with Murphy (2019). We mean this literally. That is, we are in strong and enthusiastic agreement with virtually everything he writes therein, except for one point: we think him guilty of allowing the cloven hoof of market failure into the Austrian tent. Our purpose in the...

In an article published in the Review of Austrian Economics, George Selgin and Lawrence H. White (1996) defend their position that people should be free “to issue and use fiduciary media of exchange” against criticisms also published in the RAE by Hans-Herman Hoppe (1994), Jesús Huerta de...

We stipulate, arguendo, that fractional-reserve-demand deposit banking is per se fraudulent. We ask whether or not time deposit banking can also be illicit, and answer in the positive, if there is a mismatch between the time dimensions of deposits and loans. To wit, if an intermediary borrows...

We wish to "quibble" with Murphy (2019). We mean this literally. That is, we are in strong and enthusiastic agreement with virtually everything he writes therein, except for one point: we think him guilty of allowing the cloven hoof of market failure into the Austrian tent. Our purpose in the...

The main use to which the economics profession has put the Laffer curve (at least if you judge by a representative sample of principles and intermediate textbooks) is to choose that tax rate which maximizes governmental revenues. To say the least, this enterprise cannot be justified by a resort...

It is pretty well established within Austrian economics that the optimum quantity of money is whatever level is established at any given time. The logical implication of this claim is that any amount of the commodity that intermediates trade will do as well as any other in acquitting this task....

Is money a producers' good or a capital good, or is it sui generus, as Mises, Rothbard, and other Austrians have maintained? We argue that all action is either consumption or production, and that exchange is but a form of production. Consequently, all goods are either consumers' goods or...

There is no doubt that when income or wealth increases, impatience for present goods declines. When time preference for the present falls, interest rates decline as well. But is this phenomenon a necessary condition of human action as Rothbard and Hoppe contend? This is widely thought to be true...

In an article in this journal, “The Fraud of Macroeconomic Stabilization Policy,” Gallaway and Vedder (2000; hence G&V) state that their: “arguments can be summarized with the following propositions" (pp. 31–32) (1.) All major macroeconomic paradigms have as their centerpiece the...