Mises Media

Alvin Roth won a Nobel Prize for designing workarounds to markets society finds morally repugnant. Sandy Klein argues the workarounds aren't needed. Taking Roth's objections in turn—that such markets are too thin, that participants won't reveal their preferences, that the offense others feel is a negative externality—she shows each dissolves under Austrian analysis: repugnance is simply a subjective preference, already priced into how people act, and not a market failure at all. She then applies the point to transplantable organs, where a 1984 ban on sales functions as a price ceiling of zero and the resulting shortage is counted in lives.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.

Will Gen Z ever be able to buy a house? Timothy Terrell starts by clearing away the popular explanations—institutional investors buy under two percent of homes, the median first-time buyer is still 33, and a 1950s house was half the size, often without indoor plumbing. Then he turns to the causes that hold up: Federal Reserve inflation inflating home prices while first-time buyers sit on cash, zoning rules that let existing owners vote down new supply, and Dodd-Frank regulations that killed off the small mortgages starter homes depend on.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.

Contemporary culture, with its fixation on careers, tends to downgrade the career of motherhood.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/you-know-how-happens-right

Economists have agreed on free trade for two centuries; the public and the politicians haven't caught up. Lucas Engelhardt rebuilds the case from scratch—mutual benefit, comparative advantage, and the simple point that drawing a border between two traders destroys none of the gains—then takes apart the arguments for tariffs one by one. Most timely is his treatment of trade deficits: following Mises, he shows a deficit isn't a "loss" but the natural result of Americans choosing goods over cash, and explains why "Liberation Day" tariffs actually made the deficit spike.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 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.

With New York reviving a citywide rent freeze, Joseph Salerno returns to the economics of price controls. Following Mises and Rothbard, he shows how a single cap—on milk, say—triggers shortages that pull in control after control until the state is planning everything. He tells the story of postwar Germany, starving under price controls until Ludwig Erhard abolished them in a stroke, and then traces the surprising long-run damage of rent control: not just housing shortages, but frozen mobility, decaying buildings, black markets, and even more discrimination.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 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.

Do free markets naturally tend toward monopoly, requiring antitrust to keep them honest? Tate Fegley makes the Austrian case that the whole framework is backwards. The neoclassical ideal of "perfect competition" defines away real competition—advertising, undercutting, innovating—and treats it as evidence of monopoly. Following Rothbard, Fegley argues the only coherent monopoly is one granted by the state, and works through the antitrust consequences, from Lina Khan's case against Amazon to the courts punishing Alcoa for serving customers too well.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 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.

Patrick Newman lays out the Austrian theory of the business cycle—one of the school's signature contributions. He first shows how genuine savings drives sustainable growth by lengthening the structure of production, then explains how central-bank credit expansion counterfeits that process: pushing interest rates below their natural level sends a false signal, luring entrepreneurs into long-term investments that real resources can't sustain. The result is a boom that must end in either a cleansing bust or runaway inflation—and, Dr. Newman argues, a modern policy of propping up the malinvestment that has defined the era since 2008.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 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.

Most Americans, unfortunately, believe that we are still living in the constitutional republic created in 1787. That was five republics ago.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/spoiled-sons-liberty-surveillance-leviathan-americas-six-republics-and-myth-eternal-union

Is capital a uniform "pool" that can be reshaped into anything, or a delicate, time-structured web of complementary pieces? Paul Cwik traces the question from Menger and Böhm-Bawerk through the great debates with J.B. Clark and Frank Knight, and shows why the answer matters enormously. Because capital is heterogeneous, a fall in consumption need not mean recession—it can mean the economy is lengthening its structure of production to build future growth, a shift the mainstream, assuming capital is homogeneous, simply cannot see.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 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.

While many immigrants bring entrepreneurial skills, they often settle in US cities governed by leftists who are hostile to private enterprise.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/sanctuary-cities-leave-your-ambition-and-entrepreneurial-skills-border