Mises Media

The US government continues to drag down the economy with its reckless wars and massive debt accumulation. On the other side of the globe, China is pursuing a different path.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/quiet-rise-chinese-innovation

Timothy Terrell revisits Mises's 1920 bombshell: under socialism, rational economic calculation isn't just hard—it's impossible. Without market prices for the means of production, a central planner is blind, unable to tell whether he's creating wealth or destroying it. Terrell traces the argument from Soviet railroads and steel-bodied fighter jets to a strikingly modern target: the U.S. government's central planning of the American West.

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.

Why did so many American colonials take arms against the ruling British, even when the odds were stacked against them? Dr. Wanjiru Njoya looks into the competing ideological claims that go with analyzing the American Revolution.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/ideology-behind-american-revolution

Jeffrey Herbener builds the Austrian theory of interest from the ground up. Interest, he argues, isn't the productivity of capital or a mere cost of borrowing—it's the "originary" premium that arises because human beings are temporal and prefer the same satisfaction sooner rather than later. From time preference he derives the pure rate of interest, shows why a single rate integrates the entire economy from credit cards to capital investment, and explains why productivity discounts back through the rate rather than setting it.

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.

The growing power of the centralized state loomed as the central problem for liberalism in the early nineteenth century, and the works of these three writers are a response to it.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/constant-tocqueville-and-acton-enlightenment-liberalism-and-religion

Why is a lecture on banking scheduled for the very first day of Mises University? Because, Jonathan Newman argues, banking is where money gets strange. Following Rothbard's Mystery of Banking, he separates the two things a bank can do—safekeeping your deposits and lending out savings—and shows that neither one expands the money supply. The trouble begins when a bank promises your deposit is available on demand while quietly lending most of it away.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 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.

Where does money come from? Sandy Klein walks through the Mengerian answer: not from a king's decree or a social contract, but spontaneously, as traders gravitated to the most saleable good until one commodity became universally accepted. Along the way she shows why barter can't sustain a real economy, why gold and silver kept winning out, and why—following Rothbard—there's no such thing as an "optimal" money supply.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 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.

Why teach entrepreneurship on the first day of Mises University? Because for the Austrians, Peter Klein argues, entrepreneurs aren't niche figures from the world of startups and venture capital—they're the driving force of the entire market. Following Mises, Klein defines entrepreneurship as the bearing of uncertainty: the act of combining land, labor, and capital in advance of an unknown payoff. It's not a personality trait or an industry, but a fundamental category of human action.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 19, 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.

Is a market economy a war of all against all, or the very thing that makes peace possible? Shawn Ritenour makes the Misesian case for the latter. Building from specialization and the law of comparative advantage—why even a person outdone at everything still has a place—he shows how the division of labor turns our inequalities into the glue of society, and why the only way to profit in a market is to serve someone else first.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 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.

Jeffrey Herbener builds Austrian price theory from the ground up—starting with the single acting person weighing ends against means, and arriving at Mises's calculation argument. Value is purely subjective, he shows, so no producer can gauge whether he's serving consumers well by feeling alone. What makes economizing across a division of labor possible is money prices—and the profit-and-loss accounting they enable.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 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.