I am happy to announce that the Teacher’s Manual is now available for my introductory textbook, Lessons for the Young Economist. It can be used by classroom teachers, but is also ideally suited to homeschooling instruction by parents who may not be confident in their own economics knowledge.

[Walter Block will be teaching a 6-week online course on his classic work, Defending the Undefendable, starting March 26, 2012. Enroll today.]

At first glance it is not hard to answer the question, “Is blackmail really illegitimate?” The only problem it would seem to pose is, “Why is it being asked at all?”

Do not blackmailers, well, blackmail people? And what could be worse? Blackmailers prey on people’s dark, hidden secrets. They threaten to expose and publicize them. They bleed their victims and often drive them to suicide.

While Carl Menger and Léon Walras simultaneously discovered the principle of marginal utility, their ideas about the nature of market prices are very different. Let us use as our example the modern-day phenomenon of high-frequency traders and the digital tracks they leave.

The tiny colony was apparently not too young to have "foreign affairs"; and, indeed, it learned all too quickly the ways of interstate relations.

So far as unrelated historical events provide any evidence, the historical evidence in Britain supports the view that spending cuts bring about larger economic recoveries than deficit spending does. The British government of the Great Depression followed “austerity” measures much more closely than the present British government.

If it were true that we could create prosperity merely by making goods to give away, then we would not have to give them to foreign countries.

Appropriate at this time is an overview of the Federal Reserve’s booms and busts and the shocking similarities with those of the banks before the Federal Reserve was in existence — and a consideration of actions for prevention of these destructive booms and busts in order to establish a more healthy economy.

The cameralists were German university professors who advised the princes and their bureaucracy how best to maximize their revenue and power.

The skeptic soon finds that space technology ought to be treated like all other forms of technology: with as little government intervention as possible. There is no distinctive feature about space technology that renders it necessary for the government to fund and operate it via NASA.

When confronted with the irrational, reasoning and science can only record and classify.

To hear some commentators talk, one would think that America’s trade-deficit woes would be miraculously erased with a swift devaluation. Yet two effects of the standard relationship between a weak currency and a country’s economic health bear commenting on.

The Betrayal of the American Right and the Rise of the Neoconservatives is a 6-week online course at the Mises Academy, March 21 – April 30.

The fall in the money stock that precedes price deflation and an economic slump is actually triggered by the previous loose monetary policies of the central bank and not the liquidation of debt. It is loose monetary policy that provides support for the creation of the unbacked credit necessary for fractional-reserve lending.

The plot of Henry Hazlitt’s novel, Time Will Run Back, is based on the unraveling of a socialist system and the rediscovery and triumph of capitalism.

Every dollar spent on the military, just like every dollar spent on the Department of Health and Human Services, is a dollar not spent or invested in the civilian economy. Every person employed by the military or the firms that supply the military with equipment is a person not employed in the civilian economy.

In every administration, the tools of inflation, borrowing, taxation, and regulation are used to transfer wealth from the people to the government and its cronies.

Where there has been neither force nor fraud, the accumulation of wealth (profit) is the reward for the responsible use of resources in social production, and it is allocated not arbitrarily by ruling elites but voluntarily and in precisely the desired proportion by all members of society in their capacity as consumers.

Each physical unit of a means that enters into human action is valued separately.

The Marxian doctrine of the alleged arbitrary power of employers over wages appears plausible because there are two obvious facts that it relies on, facts which do not actually support it, but which appear to support it. These facts can be described as “worker need” and “employer greed.”

Governments cannot free themselves from the pressure of public opinion. They cannot rebel against the preponderance of generally accepted ideologies, however fallacious.

Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message. Here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.

Thomas DiLorenzo’s 5-week online Mises Academy course on “The Political Economy of War” will pierce through the dense fog of relentless war propaganda.

The euro came with an implicit bailout guarantee. Market participants expected stronger governments to bail out weaker ones. The bailouts of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal have made these wealth transfers more visible. The question of who will be paying the bill decides the future of the euro. There are several possibilities.

In the Virginia colony, each person contributed the fruit of his labor according to his ability, and each received produce according to his need.

It seems that investors have been increasingly losing confidence in banks’ ability to live up to their payment obligations under “normal” market conditions and to generate sufficient profits going forward. Eurozone bank stocks have lost 71 percent of their value since the start of 2007.

Any attempt at restoring monetary freedom must be part of a comprehensive plan to roll back government.

A Rothbardian perspective shows that even many of today’s free-market economists concede too much to the government when discussing tax reform. Rather than pining for a tax code that appeared to be consistently designed with some purpose in mind, Rothbard would much prefer a tax code that violated no one’s rights.

The law of returns; convertibility and valuation; labor versus leisure.

The American Dental Association opposes proposals to allow the emergence of “mid-level dental providers” that would increase the supply of dental practitioners in rural areas. As Mises showed, occupational licensing must lead to a decrease in supply, monopolistic conditions, and thus a lessening of competition.

In many countries the emergence of the gold standard was effected by the operation of Gresham’s law.

Eventually the ball, given there was enough space and snow, would be too large for one child alone to manage, so he’d call over a friend and they’d push it until it was again too large to push. They’d call over another friend, and another. In many ways the United States’ foreign policy is much like that winter snowball game.

The Totalitarians, an 8-week online course at the Mises Academy, runs from February 26 — April 28, 2012. You can enroll online.

If the Fed’s, and every other central bank’s, actions over the past three years have seemed confused, we should not be too surprised. They are fighting a foe — deflation — that is of their own making. To keep from admitting culpability, they try to cover their tracks by enacting ever-more-tenuous and implausible policies.

Bentham began as a devoted Smithian (more consistently attached to laissez-faire), but over time he became more and more statist.

The Founders knew that the only way to protect liberty was not to strengthen the central government but to divide and decentralize power as much as possible. Libertarian centralism, dreaming about the great laissez-faire revolution by the judiciary, is just another form of "enlightened" despotism.

The history of primitive peoples shows that the desire to trade and barter is a universal human characteristic.

It’s pathetic that a government-enforced monopoly continues to lose money. In every facet of its business, the United States Postal Service has either been a failure from the get-go or its value has now been swept under the rug by newer and quicker streamlines in communication. In either case, to echo Lysander Spooner, it is unfit to exist.

Let us trace the relations among consumers’ goods and producers’ goods by considering a typical human end: the eating of a ham sandwich.

Street Freak is a great American success story — with a twist. Author Jared Dillian tells it in a fast-paced style that sweeps the reader up into his two worlds: the bare-knuckle world of price discovery on the trading floor, and Dillian’s descent into depression and OCD. All of this makes the book hard to put down.

An artificially stimulated boom must inevitably lead to crisis and depression.