An average human offered the choice to accept either $500 or a coin flip for $1,000 will choose the safe bet -- $500 guaranteed. This is a rational choice, and avoids taking risk without a premium (reward.)An average human will make the opposite...

Why does a parent have the moral right to forcefully control his children, but government does not have the right to forcefully control its citizens? Why is is permissible to enslave animals, but not human beings? What is the fundamental difference...

Lavaux Vineyard Terraces, SwitzerlandEmerald Coast, Florida Zanzibar, TanzaniaWhite Mountains, New HampshireShoreline Highway, Marin County, CaliforniaBandarban, Banglad...

A bank brokers a deal between a wine-maker and a consumer, Bob. It buys ten bottles of wine for $10 with new dollars, and sells them to Bob on credit, charging 10% interest per year. Bob agrees to repay the debt in one year, and will pay $11 as...

"Because of its explosive nature, not all applications of nitrocellulose were successful. In 1869, with elephants having been poached to near extinction, the billiards industry offered a $10,000 prize to whoever came up with the best replacement...

Jörg Guido Hülsmann (audio only) explains that "Gresham's Law -- It's not a general law of the market, it is a law of interventionism."This is simply wrong. "Bad coins" are used as money, and good coins hoarded even absent legal tender laws....

Breathalyzers work by calculating the amount of alcohol in the breath, and extrapolating the amount of alcohol in the blood by assuming that the ratio is 2100 to 1 -- that for every gram of ethanol in the breath, there are 2100 grams in the blood....

Inflation is caused primarily by the rise of wealth in society, making labor more expensive. If you won the lottery tomorrow, how much would you charge for an hour of labor? The same applies to societies that become richer over time. Today the average...

“Apple was in very serious trouble, and what was really clear was that if the game were a zero sum game, where if Apple were going to win, Microsoft has to lose, then Apple was going to lose. A lot of people’s heads were in that place at Apple,...

It saddens me to see such brilliant rhetoric wasted; directed at the victims of a creeping disease, encouraging its proliferation, instead of working to create a vaccine. The irony is palpably maddening."What They did not want you to ever find...

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Progress reduces personal freedom, but reducing personal freedom does not create progress.Many areas of modern living are logically incompatible with personal freedom, and self-directed actions by individuals, because many industries are today so...

Many conservatives and libertarians believe that when China inflates its currency, it makes the products they produce cheaper for Americans by lowering the value of its currency (and invisibly taxing its citizens).This is like claiming that higher...

Obamacare, will lower per capita insurance costs by forcing everyone to be part of the system. It avoids the risk that only sick people will purchase health insurance, and allows companies to price insurance based on actual disease rates without...

The fundamental difference between intellectual property and physical property is that theft (and duplication) of IP is harmless to its victim. If I steal your car, you are without a car. If I copy your car, you are left unharmed.The claim that...

"I worked briefly as a sub-contractor for a company that won a government contract for software development in the mid 90′s. My task was to maintain and “fix” a program another developer had written before leaving that wasn’t working correctly....

This is a continuation of a previous post, describing the economics of a WW2 POW camp, in response to a reader's question:"So what benefit is it to a bank to take deposits? Seems like printing money for loans (and getting back interest) at no cost...

Don Boudreaux writes that trade deficits are irrelevant, both because of the way they are calculated, and additionally, because dollars must always eventually return to the United States, to purchase goods and services from US producers.He correct...

Some countries, like Canada and Australia, have a fractional reserve banking system with a zero reserve requirement. The fact that inflation does not run rampant in these countries is evidence that the traditional view of FRB is flawed; the reserve...

R. A. Radford described in 1945 an account of trade in World War Two POW camps. Cigarettes, being the most liquid asset available, quickly became money; prices were listed in cigarettes and even non-smokers accepted them for their own...

What can rental cars teach us about yield curves? What are credit default swaps? Is borrowing a car fundamentally different from borrowing a dollar?The longer one borrows a car, the lower the daily rate, but the longer one borrows money, the...