The typical claim by some economic historians is that: the then "traditional way" of dealing with recessions (austerity, letting prices fall) caused unecessary pain to a lot of people. In the context of Germany however, they go a step further and say that it might have led to the rise of Nazism .

I am aware that the typical Austrian explaination as to why the depression dragged on for so long -the "traditional way" was abandoned- .In the case of America for example Austrians (Murphy, Higgs, Rothbard), argued that Herbert Hoover was had a laissez-faire response to the Depression and that a lot of what we would associate with The New Deal was spearheaded by him.

I was wondering if there is a similar case to be made for Germany. On whether if Brüning was the Hoover of Germany. (ie. Someone who's accused of having a laissez-faire approach to the depression when in reality it was nothing but)

Mises did spoke of some harmful policies enacted by Germany in response to the depression, in The Causes of the Economic Crisis(1931) and Omnipotent Government but I find them to be allusions more so than actual direct examples.

If any of you have any insights/answers on this please share. Thanks!

I found this discussion on Stacker News: https://stacker.news/items/1602574

I've seen Austrians like Hoppe call economics "the queen of social sciences" (https://mises.org/online-book/great-fiction-second-expanded-edition/29-my-life-right) but I generally have a low opinion of economists (no offense intended) and it seems to me that most of economics is a series of just-so stories.

On the other hand, I often feel like everything comes down to incentives...and isn't this the same as saying everything is economics?

sad

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58485511-the-lords-of-easy-money

I have been deeply aware of the implications of recent monetary and market regime shifts (post-GFC/COVID, ZIRP, QE, “Activist Treasury”) for some time now. Yet, I recently read this book and still managed to learn some interesting things myself. Furthermore, I was impressed by the narrative’s ability to put into perspective some major current global and US-domestic macroeconomic issues while staying within the confines of it’s scope, maintaining non-partisan objectivity, and straying from demonization of any one person or concept.

I often try to think about the layman’s perspective pertaining to economics and current affairs, and I think this book has become my first recommendation to those who genuinely wish to understand how we’ve come into out current position. No, it does not paint the entire picture, however I think it’s easy enough to follow along and ideologically neutral enough to maintain the attention of a diverse audience. It is a good starting point.

My question’s for those who have read the book:

(1) What are your thoughts on the book itself?
(2) What are your thoughts on my assessment?
(3) Are there any other books you would recommend to the layman before (or in place of) this book in order to build general knowledge and awareness of current economic policy, events, and affairs? If so, please share.

For those who haven’t read the book, please feel free to comment a book you would recommend to someone as a starting point to understand the existing economic landscape.

Every-day people constantly discuss the current economic situation with supreme and misguided confidence, and I feel it’s more important than ever to build awareness. AI can discuss many economic topics well-enough in isolation, however it must be prompted in a certain manner to give the user adequate context; the layman is not knowledgeable enough to understand this, hence the danger and emphasis I place on encouraging engagement.

Hey everyone,

Over the past couple of months I’ve developed a bit of an interest in ASE, especially with how it contrasts from the current academic environment.

I understand that Mises was at the very least skeptical of the quantization of Economics as a social science, but within my talks and readings with current Austrians, there’s generally a much more openness to using quantitative tools within the fields.

As someone with a Bachelors in Math who hopes to become a Statistician at some point, I am of course interested in how we can use Mathematics to answer questions in different fields. I find myself drawn to
ASE since I think it has pretty good mechanisms at explaining economic action, but I also find that some hardliner’s wholesale rejection of empiricism seems quite extreme.

With that being said, I wanted to inquire, within this methodological framework, what value does Mathematica, Statistics, and Empirical Data serve more broadly in explaining economic phenomena.

Thanks everyone and I am looking forward to reading the replies.

Key Details from google search:

- The Tax Rate: A one-time 5% excise tax on accumulated worldwide net worth.

- Who It Targets: State residents with a net worth of $1 billion or more.

- Residency Cutoff: Applies to individuals who were California residents as of January 1, 2026, intended to prevent avoidance via sudden relocation.

***

For starters, applying any changes retroactively is an absolute lunacy.

This nonsense is done to get votes and anyone with two brain cells knows it. CA will blow through the money in a heart beat, and won’t have anything to show for it.

If this passes it will set a precedent, but my guess is that courts will reverse it later. However, it will also mean that people in other states will become open for an idea like that, and then the congress “will be pressured”.

Passing something like that on the federal level is going to be another step towards more apparent fascism. I’m specifically using fascism, because whatever they’ll collect in taxes will be funneled back to their cronies but multiplied by X%, and fascism is when the government coerces private businesses into colluding with the government.

“This will never happen in the US!!!”

I’ve heard that so many times, but then I saw cops forcing people to shut their businesses and stay home, then I saw our president “fighting communism” by buying stock in private companies, I saw fed govt firing people for not taking a vaccine, and I live with very little sense of privacy because my right to have one is not respected at all.

The billionaires that been feeding the beast are now slowly being eaten by the beast. What an irony…

The end.

Genuine question, how would Austrian liberalism position itself in this matter?

Hi all, I just want to open up some discussion around this topic, and hear from those who are more well-read (I just recently started getting into AE). Some questions to get us started:

1. Is the interventionist state inherently a Pandora's box? Once a government takes on the role of economic manager and social provider, is it politically impossible to ever return to a free-market baseline?
2. Prevention vs. Cure: Does the Austrian model accurately diagnose that state intervention creates the very fragilities that later demand state bailouts?
3. The Political Reality: If the Austrian model is theoretically superior at preventing these crises, how does a society transition out of a high-debt, high-spending paradigm without triggering the exact social collapse the state is trying to avoid?

I’ve been thinking about how broken our money system is, and I wanted to map out a logical progression of how I got to a pretty radical conclusion: the ultimate economic solution is an Energy-Backed Currency.

I spare a talk about what we have now as who has some idea about economy sees himself (herself). Basically inflation, low wages, unemployment - definitely problems. Let's start with thinking what would have been if we go opposite, instead of having constant print of money which casues inflation (as long as amount of goods in economy is over covered etc.) economy had fixed amount of supply of money. Just a starting point to see if this can remove inflation, as we know inflation comes mainly from overprinted money. Here is the breakdown of the economic problem, why our current options fail, and how an energy standard could fix it.

🔍 Step 1: The Initial Thought Experiment

Imagine a simple 10-person economy. Everyone has $1, and everyone owns one car. A car costs $1. Total money supply = $10. Total goods = 10 cars.

Now, someone introduces a new invention: TVs. Everyone wants one. But there is still only $10 in total existence. To cover 10 cars and 10 TVs, prices must fall (deflation).

• The Catch: Your nominal wages will drop (from $1 to $0.50), but your real purchasing power stays exactly the same or increases. With your lower wage, you can now buy 1 car and 1 TV because prices dropped.

🛑 Step 2: The Problem with the Extreme Spectrums

If letting prices naturally fall works best for people, why don't we use a strictly fixed money supply like the Gold Standard or Bitcoin? Because they sit on the wrong side of the spectrum:

• The Gold/Bitcoin Problem (Hoarding): When money is strictly scarce, it constantly gains value just sitting under a mattress. This incentivizes people to never spend. Spending freezes, businesses die, and debts become unpayable because your wage drops but your fixed debt stays the same. Plus, Bitcoin is empty money. It has no real-world function or physical utility; it relies entirely on a fragile psychological illusion of value that one day I find another guy to exchange it with...
• The Wörgl/Stamp Scrip Problem (Artificial Decay): On the flip side, history shows experiments where money loses value if you hold it too long (like an apple rotting in a barter trade). This forces velocity/fluctuation and spending, but it completely destroys a person's ability to save for a rainy day. In Wörgl in 1930s it casued huge employment, but experiment lasted only 1 year on small town & one may ask himself - is it good to force people do something and punish them otherwise?

💡 Step 3: Finding the Natural "Sweet Spot"

The ideal money must be in the exact middle. It shouldn't artificially shoot up in value (like gold), and it shouldn't be designed to rot (like Wörgl scrip). It needs to mimic a stable, durable, naturally consumed real-world product. It should be something that is is used only as designed - to help exchange one thing for another, not a wealth and anything people chase and greed for.

The answer could be Electricity (The Megawatt-Hour Standard).

⚡ How an Energy-Backed Economy Solves It

In this country, money isn't printed by a government or mined out of a rock. Power plants (nuclear, solar, hydro) are the actual mints and banks.

• How it looks: A banknote or digital token is literally a pre-paid voucher. A $100 note certifies that the national grid owes you 100 kWh of live electricity. You can hand it to any energy provider to power your house, or spend it at a shop.
• Why it holds value (Entropy vs. Production): While physical electricity stored in a battery degrades over time down to zero, a claim on continuous grid production does not. As long as humans need power to survive, cook, and run machines, that note will never drop to zero utility.
• No Debt Trap: Instead of predatory interest-bearing loans, people are pushed into equity partnerships. You fund a new business by allocating them the physical energy credits they need to run their machinery in exchange for a % of the equity.
• The Policy Incentive: To spend more money on public services, politicians have only one path: they must build more nuclear plants, upgrade solar infrastructure, or increase grid efficiency. Politics becomes a game of engineering rather than printing promises.
• The Infrastructure Reality Check: If the government wants to build a new subway system, they cannot just pass a law to "fund it." They must look at the grid dashboard. If the subway construction requires 10 million MWh of energy, and the nation only has an 8 million MWh surplus, the project is physically impossible. May sounds brutal for someone who likes debt or lending, but in the long run nature always chases equilibrium - anything other than this create anomaly and these are painful as we know it.
• The "Baseline Survival" Welfare: Instead of a complex cash-welfare system prone to fraud, the government distributes a monthly Energy Dividend to every citizen (e.g., 300 kWh directly credited to their home grid account). This guarantees baseline survival (heating, cooking, basic lighting) without introducing hyperinflation into the economy.
• Un-fakeable Pricing: A standard loaf of bread takes roughly 2 kWh of electrical energy to cultivate, harvest, mill, and bake. Therefore, it costs 2 energy tokens. A corrupt leader cannot print 10x more tokens to buy votes because the energy providers legally cannot redeem a token if the physical electricity wasn't generated.
• The Equity Partnership Model: Since money doesn’t passively multiply on its own, the only way to grow your wealth is to back real-world productivity. If you have a surplus of 50,000 kWh tokens, you don't park them in a speculative savings account. Instead, you form a partnership with an entrepreneur who wants to open an automated greenhouse. You fund their initial energy bill in exchange for a percentage of the tomatoes they produce.
• Counterfeits: In an energy economy, you can't buy electricity with anonymous paper; you can only buy it with energy tokens. If a residential house suddenly draws the electrical power of a small factory, the grid automatically flags the energy imbalance instantly. In this system, gold is stripped of its "artificial status" as the ultimate financial safe haven. Instead, it is valued strictly for what it physically is: a useful, rust-resistant metal needed for electronics, dental work, and jewelry.

Money stops being a psychological illusion, a wall street betting game, or empty paper. It becomes an honest, un-fakeable receipt for a fraction of the nation's physical capacity to do work.

What do you guys think? Would a system like this actually survive contact with the real world?

I’ll start.

Capitalism is when the government gives multibillion dollar corporations subsidies and calls it a free market.

A: Friedman's k-percent rule

B: Fixed amount of money

C: Money supply linked to population changes

D: MMT style

Other (write down)

Answer: "Government should be run ineffectively" doesn't count.

Between 1948 to 1973, US productivity and hourly compensation were closely tied to one another, with productivity growing 96.7%, and wages growing 91.3%. This is no longer true, from 1979 to now productivity has grown by 90.2% while hourly compensation grew by only 33%. Why is this.

Let's assume that Austrian Economics being implemented after today. Like gold standard, full-reserve banking, like real "liberty", just laws that we really need and nothing more etc. How it would look like? Let's assume after 5 years, 10 years how would prices be? House prices etc. How many years would least earning person need to buy a house? How a monthly expenditure would be like? All the education fees, health fees etc. since they will also become privatized. Thanks!

What western leader today could explain the value of price signals in such a way?

The author is going to make your blood boil several times during the video, whether you’re proponent of AE or mainstream economics. I’d put him closer to MMTer just from his perspective on the role of government spending and government debt alone.

I wouldn’t pay much attention to his own theory that he pushes throughout his videos, as most of the time, he takes events in complete isolation and the entire view is based from econometrics, and from his own models, which of course are correct in his own opinion.

The value of content is in his explanations of what governments do today. He’s sharing a lot of interesting data there, which you can use to make your own conclusions.