The anti-slavery disunionists and the abolitionists were some of the most critical of slavery and the most serious about ending it. For them, decentralization and secession were potential solutions not problems in ending slavery.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/anti-slavery-advocates-disunion

Record-breaking skyscrapers have a habit of opening just as the economy turns—a pattern Mark Thornton connected to Austrian business cycle theory in his work on the skyscraper curse. Lucas Engelhardt, Thornton's coauthor on the 2015 response to the curse's critics, explains the mechanism: artificially low interest rates raise land prices, and bid-rent theory shows why the effect concentrates downtown, precisely where towers get built. Add larger firms and cheap research and development to solve the engineering, and the record tower and the cyclical peak arrive together. He then works through the critics' statistical case and shows that their own results—including their finding that height and output move together—point the same way.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Everyone agrees higher education is in crisis—tuition rising ten times faster than the price level, administrative bloat, a looming demographic cliff, collapsing public confidence. Peter Klein argues these are symptoms, not the disease. Answering the claim that education is a special good beyond ordinary economic analysis, he shows that what markets actually deliver are discrete units of educational goods and services, and that standard Austrian analysis applies as readily here as to shoes. The structural problem is that there is no free market to speak of: state entities own most institutions, even elite privates draw nearly half their revenue from government, and a handful of federally licensed accreditors control entry. Following Rothbard, Klein's answer is the separation of education and state—with the Mises Institute itself as a working example.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

What can economics actually teach you about running a business? From the mainstream, Per Bylund argues, very little—its models have no room for the entrepreneur at all. Austrian economics is a different matter. Working from Menger forward, Bylund lays out the sequence every business faces: costs come first and certain, value comes last and unknown. From that he draws the practical implications—why cost-plus pricing is a recipe for failure, why no producer has "pricing power" even as a monopolist, why the firm is best understood as a temporary island of specialization, and why the entrepreneur's only real question is how best to serve the consumer.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Money is never neutral. Jeffrey Degner works line by line through the passage of Cantillon's Essay that made the case nearly three centuries ago—showing how new money enters the economy unevenly, enriching those who receive it first and squeezing everyone who receives it last. Cantillon named the losers precisely: those on fixed wages, and property owners locked into leases as their costs rise. Degner then brings the analysis forward, connecting it to the several distinct patterns now described as the "K-shaped economy"—divergence between sectors, between the consumption of high- and low-income households, and between a soaring stock market and consumer sentiment that has fallen below its COVID lows.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Austrian economics did not begin in 1871. Mark Thornton traces its lineage back through the thinkers the mainstream dismisses: the Spanish Scholastics, who worked out subjective value and the effects of inflation while dismantling the case against usury; the anti-mercantilists who told Louis XIV to abolish his taxes; the Physiocrats; and above all Richard Cantillon, whom Rothbard called the father of modern economics. Drawing on twenty-five years of his own research, Thornton makes the case for why the history of economic thought is not antiquarianism but a laboratory—and notes that the good ideas tend to appear precisely when the state grows tyrannical, overtaxes, and overspends.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Norway sits on large oil deposits, yet has managed to avoid the “resource curse” that has bedeviled so many nations that have abundant natural resources, but severely mismanage their economies.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-norway-built-worlds-largest-fund-and-thriving-economy-boot

Modern Monetary Theory's central claim is that a government with a printing press is never budget constrained — so the only real limit on spending is inflation, not debt. Jonathan Newman takes MMT on in its own words, working through clips of MMT proponents making their case before responding. He shows why "their deficit is your surplus" collapses once you ask how debt service is financed, why the WWII economy MMT holds up as a model was a depression for private citizens once government spending is stripped from GDP, and—drawing on his chapter in a forthcoming Mises Institute book—why the archaeological record of ancient Mesopotamia flatly contradicts MMT's account of where money came from.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Game theory has Austrian roots—Oskar Morgenstern was Mises's doctoral student—but the way it's taught leads almost everywhere to the same conclusion: individuals left alone reach bad outcomes, so the state must intervene. Lucas Engelhardt argues the reasoning has a hole in it. Standard analysis treats the game as fixed, when real people are entrepreneurial: alert to opportunity, able to see a bad equilibrium coming and restructure the payoffs before it arrives. Working through the tragedy of the commons, public goods, tariffs, and Huerta de Soto's account of why bankers lobbied for a central bank, he offers a better question—not what should government impose, but how will entrepreneurs change the game, and if they haven't, what's stopping them?

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Paul Cwik and Shawn Ritenour trace what happened to the Austrian school after Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser—as it spread beyond Vienna and produced a generation of thinkers most students never encounter. Philip Wicksteed, the Unitarian minister who dispensed with the supply curve; William Smart, who gave English readers Böhm-Bawerk; Herbert Davenport and Frank Fetter, the core of the American school; and Richard von Strigl, the last Austrian in Vienna. Then the harder question: why that flourishing stalled, and what it took to revive it.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.