| Anatomy of the Fed | Robert P. Murphy | 69.0000 |
This course covers both the theory and history behind the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. Instructor Robert Murphy details the theory of free-market banking, and contrasts it with the distorted banking sector resulting from special government privileges. Murphy relays the sordid tale of how the Federal Reserve Act was designed on Jekyll Island in a secret meeting of government officials and international bankers. He also covers the mechanics of modern Fed operations and the commercial banking sector. The course also applies Austrian business cycle theory to the stock market crash of 1929 and the recent housing bubble.
The goal of the class is to provide a solid introduction to both the theory of free-market versus cartelized central banking and the day-to-day mechanics of the Federal Reserve in action.
After explaining how money and banking would develop in a free-market economy, Professor Murphy explain central banking from a theoretical perspective. Specifically, the course examines how central banking — that is, a government-sponsored cartel of banks with one privileged bank sitting atop the pyramid — serves to circumvent the market's natural checks on credit expansion. In addition to increasing the money supply and prices, central banking also fosters the boom-bust cycle.
After reviewing the theory of free versus central banking, the course explores the historical origins of the Federal Reserve. Students will learn the institutional structure of the Fed and learn how to read its balance sheet in real time. Professor Murphy walks through conventional and unconventional Fed operations, studying not just the theory but also the implementation. (For example, exactly how does the Fed go about buying an extra $600 billion in Treasury securities? Are the cuddly bears being paranoid or not?)
Finally, the course wraps up by connecting the operations of the Fed — and its predecessors — with financial crises from US history. These will include the Fed-induced crises of the Great Depression and the housing bubble, but also earlier panics attributable (at least partially) to the swings in credit engineered by earlier incarnations of the US central bank.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/anatomy-of-the-fed-independent-study/ |
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| Austrian Macroeconomics | Joseph Salerno | 49.0000 |
This course builds upon the basic analytic principles of Austrian economics, including basic supply and demand analysis and the theories of entrepreneurship and factor pricing, to present the fundamentals of Austrian macroeconomics.
The Austrian approach to macroeconomics was developed by the followers of Carl Menger, and in modern times included most notably Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. Unlike mainstream macroeconomics, Austrian macroeconomics is not a body of theory separate from basic value and price theory that aims at analyzing the economy as a holistic entity apart the individual households, firms and markets that constitute it. Austrian macroeconomics is only “macro” in the limited sense that it uses general economic theory to analyze specifically those phenomena that pervade individual exchanges throughout the market economy. Thus Austrian macroeconomics is the economics of time and money. Money is routinely traded on all markets and hence changes in its value influence all economic transactions. Likewise, all consumption and production choices must take into account two facts about human action. First, all action takes time; second, waiting longer for the result of action by saving is always less desirable because of “time preference,” but more productive because it permits longer processes of production that increase the scope for the use of capital goods that improve productivity. The interest rate pervades the entire price system because it both reflects all consumption/saving choices and regulates the extent to which capital is used in the overall economy.
This course will provide an overview of several topics, using analysis and case studies. It will cover the origin, nature, and value of money, the various types of money, and the causes of changes in the value of money (that is, “inflation” and “deflation”). It will explain the operation and consequences of fractional-reserve banking and central banking and how intervention into money by governments and their central banks influence its value. The nature and determination of the interest rate and its relationship with the structure of production and economic growth will be discussed. The Austrian theory of the business cycle will be explained and used to analyze how central bank manipulation of the money supply and interest rates causes cycles of economic boom and depression. This will be illustrated by the application of the theory to explaining the housing bubble and financial crisis.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/macro/ |
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| Austrian Microeconomics | Peter Klein | 49.0000 |
The heart of Austrian economics is its theory of value, exchange, production, and market intervention, what is typically called “price theory” or “microeconomics.”
Austrian microeconomics was introduced by Carl Menger and developed and extended by his Austrian, British, and American followers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike his contemporaries Walras and Jevons, Menger focused not only on the principle of marginal analysis, but also on the subjective, human aspects of valuation and the scientific principle of cause and effect. As such, Austrian price theory is substantially different from the microeconomics of contemporary, neoclassical textbooks.
This course provides a systematic overview of Austrian microeconomics, starting with the basic of scarcity, choice, and value; then moving to exchange and demand; the determination of prices; factor markets and factor pricing (including labor); profit, loss, and the entrepreneur; the structure of production; and competition and monopoly. Though the emphasis is theoretical, the course utilizes several case studies in order to examine principles that apply broadly to everyday, ordinary economic problems.
The main text is Milton M. Shapiro, Foundations of the Market-Price System (University Press of America, 1985), supplemented by sections from Thomas C. Taylor, An Introduction to Austrian Economics (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1980) and Percy L. Greaves, Jr., Understanding the Dollar Crisis (Western Islands Publishers, 1
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/microeconomics/ |
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| Broken Capitalism | David Gordon | 59.0000 |
This course will use some of the best writing of Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises to study state intervention into the market and its pernicious effects.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/broken-capitalism/ |
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| How to Think: Introduction to Logic | David Gordon | 49.0000 |
This course will present some of the essentials of logic---the science of correct reasoning. Deductive reasoning transmits truth from premises to conclusion. If one starts with true premises, and reasons correctly, the conclusion will be true also. We will identify common fallacies and give examples of these from discussions in politics and economics. The course will emphasize ordinary language reasoning rather than mathematical logic.Although we will stress practical applications, some of the philosophical issues that logic raises will also be covered. Whatever your field of study, you will find a grasp of logic of great help in your work.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/logic/ |
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| Human Action: Austrian Economics & Philosophy | David Gordon | 49.0000 |
It is perhaps the most important and profound book ever written. Yet how many, in their attempts to read it, have been stopped in their tracks by Part I? In those 7 chapters, Mises lays out the philosophical underpinnings of economics and social philosophy. So they are crucial for understanding the rest of the treatise. Yet, for the reader not versed in philosophy, the technical terminology and references can be daunting.
In this course, David Gordon explains everything you need to know to make sense of the concepts presented in these chapters. He defines the terms, provides background for the references, and elucidates exactly what it is that Mises is saying in these passages.
If this classic has been sitting on your shelf or in your Kindle just waiting for you to tackle it, then there is no better way to start than with this course.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/humanaction1/ |
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| Human Action: Austrian Sociology | David Gordon | 49.0000 |
This course covers Part II of Human Action. It is not required to have taken Human Action, Part I before taking this course.
In this course, some of the most important concepts in Human Action are examined. Mises asked a profound question: what is the basis of human society? He found the answer in social cooperation. Human beings gain more from peaceful exchange than from destructive struggles, and Mises made this fundamental fact the basis of his social theory.
Social cooperation through the free market makes possible the division of labor. Trade and specialization are keys to continued prosperity. The course covers Mises’s brilliant extension of David Ricardo’s law of comparative cost into a more general law of association.
The course also examines Mises’s account of the role of ideas in history, his refutation of collectivist and holistic accounts of society, and his explanation of calculative action. The course does not presuppose any previous knowledge of Human Action.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/human-action-part-ii/ |
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| The Road to Serfdom: Despotism, Then and Now | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 59.0000 |
The purpose of this course, "The Road to Serfdom: Despotism Then and Now," is to educate students about these contemporary dangers and arm them with the intellectual ammunition that they will need to oppose them and champion freedom instead. The totalitarian socialists of the early 20th century understood that they could not succeed unless they first discredited the ideas of freedom. The only way to stop their intellectual descendants ("the totalitarians in our midst," as Hayek would call them) is to counter their totalitarian ideas. Hayek was a hero of society for putting his career as a renowned economic theorist on hold (for most of the rest of his life, it turned out) to lay out one of the most articulate arguments for a free society ever made.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/the-road-to-serfdom-then-and-now/ |
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| The Rothbardian Analysis of the State | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 49.0000 |
Murray Rothbard was a brilliant Austrian School economist and the most famous libertarian scholar of the twentieth century. Deeply educated in history, political philosophy and science, as well as economics, he was known for his extraordinarily astute analyses of the state and all of its activities.
The recent explosion of interest in the writings of Rothbard (and of Austrian economics in general) has focused on Rothbard’s work on money, banking, and business-cycle theory. The reason for this is the increasingly widespread understanding that it was the Greenspan Fed — and other government policies — that created the housing bubble in 2001 and, subsequently, the “Great Recession” that began in late 2006. Only the Austrians recognized these bubbles and predicted the inevitable bursts.
Rothbard’s work challenges the notion of the Public Choice school of economic thought lead by Nobel laureates James M. Buchanan and George Stigler, who maintain that state is somehow a voluntary organization. His work also demolishes the theory held by mainstream economists that taxation, too, is somehow voluntary. Relying on more than just narrow economic theory, Rothbard’s work explains such phenomena as the role of the state’s “ideological minions," i.e. the Paul Krugmans and Doris Kearns-Goodwins of the world, the role of ideology, the role of intellectuals, the nature of state coercion, and much more.
This eight-week online course explores Rothbard’s theories about the nature of the state, libertarian class theory, bureaucracy, the economic analysis of government spending and taxing, interventionism and socialism, central banking, war, and other concepts. The goal of the course is to equip students with the kind of economic, historical, and philosophical theoretical framework that Rothbard himself employed so well in analyzing the effects of the state on society.
The topical course outline is as follows:
1. Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State”
2. John C. Calhoun and Libertarian Class Theory
3. Rothbardian Analysis of Bureaucracy
4. Rothbardian Analysis of Government Spending
5. Rothbardian Analysis of Taxation
6. Interventionism and Socialism
7. Central Banking and the State
8. War and the State
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/rothbardian-analysis-of-the-state-independent-study/ |
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| Why Capitalism? | David Gordon | 49.0000 |
Forget Ronald Reagan; Henry Hazlitt was the true “great communicator.” Especially in his classic work Economics in One Lesson, Hazlitt brought to bear his prodigious writing talents, honed through his long career as a journalist, to make the case for the free market to the lay reader.
Ludwig von Mises was a master theorist who made hugely important contributions to economic science. Yet, he too was a master communicator. Especially in his popular essays and in his speeches, he explained the wondrously beneficial workings of the market economy with clarity and force.
This course will be an exploration of how capitalism lifts men from poverty to plenty, using a selection of Hazlitt’s and Mises’s best writing.
| http://academy.mises.org/courses/why-capitalism-is/ |
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