Very nice clip. Do not care about Polish subtitles. It’s a work of art anyway:

Poor Arthur Laffer. I bet he now has a Laffer-curve-like face because of the necessity to give back this penny. Or maybe not, since the penny already lost much of its value?

Almost everyone has something to say about the current crisis and the serious trouble our little greenback friend is in. We are about to be reminded that empires do not fall because of barbarians at the gates, wars of civilizations, or free trade. It’s the inflation that kills them.

What is stunning about the current situation is the sudden disappearance from the stage of the not-so-long-ago fashionable Keynesian and monetarist doctrines. Even more surprising, most Keynesians and monetarists speak now in the language of fundamentals about micro problems and malinvestments. FULL ARTICLE

Have you ever wondered about the greatness of the book called “Nation, State, and Economy”? Maybe you wondered why that piece from 1919 is so universal and its theses are easily applicable to the modern demo-liberal state? Or maybe you’ve wondered how Mises came up with mostly correct conclusions about secession and self-determination?

Well, wonder no more, and instead read the first chapter of Huelsmann’s book. Mises lived in an empire with enormous ethnical and religious diversity. He saw different cultural, national and religious groups; hence he had everyday experience, which could explain his willingness to write NSE and his interest in theories of nation-states. Moreover, the fact that he’d grown up in this environment makes his case for free trade even more understandable, since protectionism is a destructive weapon activated in case of heterogeneous groups.

Apart from that it should come as no surprise that due to those conditions Mises grew up to become a tolerant person. Although he was always very sure of himself, he perfectly accepted the notion that other people might have different opinions than his own, and he would not show disrespect because of that. As we will see, Huelsmann proves the so-called Machlup-Friedman myth about Mises’s intolerance to be incorrect. But let’s leave this story to tell later on.
The chapter also gives some clues about the lady behind the genius – that is Adele Mises, Ludwig’s mother, who had enormous impact on his character and attitude.

We’ve often heard that monetarists and Austrians agree that the government is to blame for the Great Depression. A deeper look shows that this is nothing but empty rhetoric.Here I debunk the popular view that Milton Friedman proved that the Great Depression was not a market failure and that Friedman made a very strong argument against interventionism. FULL ARTICLE

“The A-team” supports the idea of natural law, rejects the nominalist tradition, rejects relativism both on ethical and epistemological grounds, supports entrepreneurship and free market, praises division of labor and monetary economy, builds its morality on the nonaggression axiom, rejects the necessity for economic regulation, undermines the government itself by demonstration of its failures, and shows how society is shaped by human action.

The “A” in the praised TV series probably stands for anarcho-capitalist.

1. First of all, the A-team is an illegal, anti-government, underground organization of people who escaped from prison. They are outlaws, surely pay no taxes, and, in most episodes, the US army is chasing them. Are these guys a band of thugs? Not at all. They are portrayed as positive heroes and the government apparatus is portrayed as the institution that unjustly tries to imprison them.

2. The A-team does not respect positive law, since this statist invention is responsible for their plight. However, the whole series is built on the idea that there are easily recognizable ethical values that cannot be questioned by any human being, even by the state itself. There is no moral relativism, or epistemological relativism, for we exactly know what is right and what is wrong, and our intellect grants us the ability to recognize it. No verdict, no bill, or no general’s will can change that fact. Official institutions can only obscure the nature of things, and nobody has a power to change them. This clearly corresponds to the idea of natural law, so greatly expressed by Bastiat – positive law that denies natural law can have only one consequence: law perverted. Hence the A-team believes rightly that there are universal and never changing ethical values, which should be respected at any time by anyone.

3. One of the most famous sentences from the theme is the reference to a “crime they didn’t commit.” During the Vietnam War these soldiers were ordered by their colonel to rob a bank. After they finished their job, they found out that their headquarters were destroyed. It was impossible for them to prove that they acted as the colonel told them to. The US government, then, decided to prosecute them for the crime. Here we have another great example how positive law perverts the natural law. When the individuals acting on their own do something wrong, it is considered a “crime”. But if the government engages in such a behavior, then suddenly “crime” is out of a picture. One of the famous examples is of course taxation. The state takes over people’s income without their consent, but if some private individual takes someone’s money without consent, he is considered a “criminal”. This is a classic example of verbal law production and a Hobbesian belief that will can change or create law.

4. The whole philosophy of the A-team boils down to an axiom of non-aggression. They never initiate a conquest on someone else’s property, no matter what profits that would create. They also never defend true aggressors. Instead the people against whom aggression was initiated always employ them. This feature is completely essential for them to take any challenge. In the episodes they engage in entrepreneurial analysis to find out what is happening, who is responsible for what, and how the aggression was started. Moreover, the A-team is of course acting with the consent of the persons who were attacked–unlike the state, which grants to itself a right to decide for somebody to defend him.

5. Clearly the A-team is an example of an anarchistic creativity, but certainly of the capitalist version, not the leftist one. The crew’s actions are based on the advanced division of labor – it concerns both the internal organization, and the external, since the A-team obviously uses the external market in order to achieve its results. The clients are mostly people who are not good in the production of security, but instead devote their time to producing something else. With earned income they hire people with comparative advantage, the A-team, to protect their rightful property and lives.

6. The A-team is a type of anarchist, anti-leftist, organization that relies on economic calculation. In a sense the A-team is a beneficial, efficiently organized firm, which has prices for its inputs and outputs. Every production process requires money capital so the necessary factors of production are bought (guns, oil, people hired, and other resources). In order for the whole process to be profitable the A-team naturally prices their product: the production of security. So forget the idea that it has anything to do with leftist anarchism. This production of security is organized on a completely commercial basis. All economic goods are scarce, so one has to pay a price for them.

7. The anarchism of the A-team is clearly an Austrian type, not the neoclassical. Of course goods produced by them are priced, as any other useful service. It does not mean that at any times in any place the A-team is acting like a neoclassical firm owner, searching only for the lowest inputs and the highest revenues. As is mostly the case with real capitalists, the A-team sometimes offers its services for a lower price or even on a charitable basis. Hence we see that the crew is a clear example of homo agens, choosing means and ends, not homo economicus, automatically responding to price spreads. In other words, although economic calculation is essential to their proper functioning, there are limits to that calculation. Certain things are valued without reference to market prices.

8. A-team successes are amazing despite the fact that the government has outlawed them. Moreover, they are not only haunted by the official law, but what is even more inspiring, they are a completely unregulated organization. Think about it – they got no permission from the government to act, no government official is subjecting them to an official statist control, they have no accounting books and no lawyers, they do not have to explain themselves or report to any politician. They just do their job by producing and supplying the goods that are demanded by peaceful individuals. And guess what? Without the government regulation their achievements are unbelievable.

9. The A-team proves also that the so called ‘free rider’, or maybe in their case ‘positive external effects’, is completely irrelevant for the production of security. Statist theory claims that the production of security should be supplied by compulsory monopolistic measures since all the people benefit from them but cannot be excluded if they decide not to pay. In the A-team there is no problem with that. Of course there are certain individuals who will benefit from their actions despite the fact that they won’t pay a penny. Any security agency is doing a favor to a person respecting property rights even though not every single person of that kind pays that agency. This, however, does not change the fact that the A-team works properly on the voluntary basis and finds its customers without monopolized use of force. They can successfully find the clients without making their services compulsory.

10. What follows from the above is a pro-market view of the private business and the government production of goods, for the only thing the latter achieves is a government failure. The A-team has to be hired because the government, despite levying taxes, is not able to help individuals defend themselves. Instead of efficiently chasing the criminals, government is more interested in chasing real entrepreneurs. Fortunately the A-team is able to make fools of them, notoriously escaping from their custody with never-ending smiles on their faces. The crew’s chief is Hannibal Smith, great leader, brilliant planner, a natural elite, who constantly smokes his cigar, a symbol of his defiance against the socialist-puritan ethos of our time.

I am very happy to inform that the Polish Mises Institute is preparing the
Polish translation of Human Action which should be ready by the end of 2007.
The book has not been translated into Polish yet and Mises is mostly known
in Poland only for his minor works. If you would like to learn more please
visit this webpage

In English translation of Economic Calculation we read a sentence:

“Marginal utility does not posit any unit of value, since it is obvious that
the value of two units of a given stock is necessarily greater than, but
less than double, the value of a single unit.”

It seems like Mises thought about measuring utility.

In German the sentence is as follows “…da bekanntlich der Wert zweier
Einheiten. aus einem gegebenen Vorrat nicht doppelt so groß ist als der e i
n e r Einheit, sondern notwendig größer sein muß.”

So it seems that the sentence should be: “it is obvious that the value of
two units of a given stock is not the double of the value of a single unit,
but its total value is necessarily greater than value of one unit” or
something like that.

One student is translating Economic Calculation into Polish, he checked the
German version and brought my attention to it.

I’m pleased to report that Rothbard’s classic article on Edmund Burke has been printed in a Polish newspaper. Here are the scans: 1, 2, 3.

I happy to report to that Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.’s article “Bandits and loopholes” has been printed in Polish conservative-libertarian weekly magazine “Najwyzszy Czas!”. It has about 40-50 thousand readers (official numbers are not available). It is about 10% of Polish Newsweek edition, so has a pretty big audience. Here are some scans of the piece: 1 and 2. See also Mises.Pl