Ludwig von Mises transformed the Austrian School of economics by cementing praxeology - the formal study of purposeful human action - as its foundational methodology. In Human Action, Mises argued that economics cannot rely on the empirical models of the natural sciences. Because human beings possess free will, values, and motives, their choices cannot be measured in a laboratory or captured by mathematical formulas. Instead, Mises built economic science on an a priori foundation: the action axiom. This is the self-evident truth that humans act consciously, using scarce means to achieve preferred ends. From this single starting point, Mises logically deduced core economic concepts, including marginal utility, time preference, and the subjective nature of value: minimum wages raise unemployment, rent controls cause housing shortages, price controls create black markets, expansionary monetary policies reduces the purchasing power of money. Praxeology is fundamental to Austrian economics because it shifts the focus from abstract aggregates (like GDP or price indices) back to the individual decision-maker. It establishes that economic laws are universal, logical truths rather than tentative hypotheses waiting to be validated by data. By using deductive reasoning, Austrians can confidently analyze complex interventions - such as inflation, price controls, and central banking - and predict their outcomes with logical certainty. Mises's development of praxeology insulated the Austrian School from the pitfalls of mainstream econometrics. It provides a unique insight illustrating how the market is not a machine to be engineered, but a dynamic, continuous process driven by the purposeful choices of real people.

In 1441, the Pope and a Medici duke drew a border map wrong, leaving a tiny strip of land completely unclaimed. The accident spawned a 385-year experiment in libertarianism. The verdict? It worked! For nearly four centuries, Cospaia had no formal government, no military, no taxes and no laws. Order was maintained voluntarily through a Council of Elders and family heads who settled minor disputes. Instead of a disorderly Mad Max dystopia, Cospaia became an entrepreneurial economic success story. The community built a thriving, peaceful marketplace governed entirely by voluntary contracts and private property rights. Neighboring citizens flocked there to trade without state interference. When Europe banned or heavily taxed tobacco, Cospaia became the continent's free-trade hub for growing and trading (and smuggling) the herb. When Cospaia did fall, it wasn't an internal collapse. The end came in 1826 when, envious of its untaxed wealth, Papal States and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany forced through a treaty to partition the territory. For 385 years, Cospaia showed how human beings don’t need central planners to thrive. When you leave people alone, voluntary cooperation, free trade, and peace naturally prevail. Taxation isn’t the price we pay for civilization. Civilization is what happens when the government forgets you exist.

It's not just the ludicrous notion that a blind man can sue because he can't see a tapestry - think about the amount of resources that will now be wasted on this lawsuit. We're just not a serious country anymore.

Judging from his plans, his dad must have been Pol Pot or Chairman fucking Mao.

Reform & the Tories *say* how terribly high spending is & how urgent nay desperate it is that spending be cut, but then when spending cuts are announced they're suddenly all "Not like that!" Everyone's cuts plans barely scratch the surface. We need all of them & much much more.

In 1964, a young University of Michigan anthropologist went to live with a tribe untouched by modernity. What he found destroyed the noble savage myth. Then his own discipline spent the next four decades trying to destroy him for publishing it. 🧵

Ludwig von Mises was born 145 years ago today. The world is a very different place than it was back then, but Mises’s impact continues to be felt to this day.

If Burnham gets his way, this is what awaits Britain.

Ludwig von Mises was born on this day 145 years ago, on 29 September 1881, in Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He spent the rest of his life telling governments they could not do what they most wanted: run an economy from a desk. Mises made his case before the Soviet experiment had imploded: without private property there are no genuine prices; without prices there is no economic calculation. Socialism, he argued, is not just a moral failure; it is an impossibility. Planners can issue quotas. They cannot know what anything is worth. From a single axiom - that human beings act purposefully - he built praxeology: economics as the logic of choice under scarcity, not as a branch of physics with better graphs. The business cycle, in his account, was not a mysterious storm. It was the trail left by cheap credit. Sound money was not a nostalgia but the condition of honest accounting and a functioning economy. He stayed in Vienna and the Geneva, before travelling to New York in 1940, with a growing reputation. Here he went on teaching as if the century’s fashions were a temporary error. Hayek took the knowledge problem further. Rothbard took the politics further. The line still runs through both. Mises did not set out to be liked. He went against the zeitgeist at his time and today, on his 145st birthday, his ideas continue to upset the political and economic establishment.

Most people view economic disruption, bankruptcies, and job losses as catastrophic failures. But such upheaval isn't a glitch in capitalism that needs correcting by government - it is the feature that drives economic progress. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described how entrepreneurial capitalism dismantles old business models, industries and technologies and replaces them with new, more productive ones. Schumpeter famously labelled the process “Creative Destruction”. To Schumpeter, the true value of free market competition was not so much about price, but about the realignment of whole industries. And while unrestrained competition and innovation inevitable produces temporary displacements such as bankruptcies and unemployment, Schumpeter cautioned that attempting to cushion or prevent this destruction through government intervention is deeply counterproductive. State subsidies for uncompetitive or dying industries or other regulatory protections only stifle the incentives for future innovators, locking the economy into structural stagnation. Schumpeter pointed out how economic progress requires a tolerance for the disruptions that are integral parts of capitalism. The free market is the only economic framework capable of fostering this relentless cycle of renewal, transforming short-term disruption into long-term human prosperity.

No truer words.

Silly line from Burnham on "taking back control" being synonymous with nationalisation. Do ordinary people have more control of their NHS options or how they can buy a car and insurance for it? A market economy is much more democratising than state power.

This is indisputably a sharp populist left turn for the country. Burnham thinks the 70s were good, and the 90s were bad. I’m not sure any rational human being can possibly agree with that analysis. On any metric.

Yes, we should scrap the triple lock. But that doesn’t make any savings, it simply slows the rate of increase in a budget that will continue to balloon for demographic reasons. And even that effect won’t kick in for several years. It certainly won’t touch the £18 billion starting cost of a National Care Service - which will, like the NHS, soon become open-ended in its demands.

The Soviet Union once tried to abolish genetics. Trofim Lysenko, a poorly educated agronomist, rose to power in Stalin’s USSR by promising miraculous increases in crop yields - exactly what the regime was looking for. He rejected decades of established genetic research as “bourgeois pseudoscience” and instead promoted the idea that characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime could be inherited by its offspring. According to Lysenko, if wheat was trained to survive in cold conditions, future generations would inherit that resistance. With Stalin’s enthusiastic backing, Lysenko’s views became official state doctrine. Genetics was banned from universities and research institutes. Leading scientists who defended the traditional science were denounced, arrested, even executed. The most prominent victim was Nikolai Vavilov, one of the world’s greatest geneticists and plant breeders, who died of starvation in a Soviet prison in 1943. Lysenko’s methods were applied across Soviet agriculture with disastrous results. His techniques repeatedly failed to deliver the promised yields, contributing to chronic food shortages. Yet because his theories aligned with Marxist ideology – which emphasised the power of environment and rejected “bourgeois” notions of fixed heredity – they were protected from criticism. This was not merely a case of bad science; it was a deliberate political project in which the state attempted to subordinate biological reality to ideological requirements. When empirical evidence conflicted with the regime’s worldview, the evidence was suppressed and those who defended it were punished. Of course, we see the same pattern today whenever political movements insist that institutions must affirm contested claims about human biology - particularly around sex and gender - even when those claims contradict well-established findings in genetics, endocrinology, and developmental biology. When ideology claims authority over scientific truth, the result is not progress, but the corruption of both science and public policy.

In September 1967, 110,436 Brits were waiting to get a telephone line installed. 18,049 had been waiting for more than for a year. Before its historic privatisation in 1984, the UK’s telecommunications network was managed by the Post Office, a nationalised government department. British Telecom (BT) stands as one of the most striking case studies in the shift from state-run monopoly to private enterprise. Under state control, efficiency was secondary to bureaucracy. Consumers faced notorious waiting lists that lasted months - or even years - just to get a telephone line installed in their homes. To manage the chronic shortage of infrastructure, the government routinely issued "party lines," forcing next-door neighbours to share a single connection. If your neighbour was on the phone, your dial tone was dead. Innovation stalled, customer service was an afterthought, and the state struggled to fund the massive capital investments required for the emerging digital age. The Thatcher government’s privatisation of BT marked a watershed moment in economic history. It was the first massive public utility sell-off, launching the concept of "popular capitalism" by encouraging ordinary citizens to buy shares. While privatisation initially brought predictable criticism regarding job cuts and executive pay, it fundamentally transformed the UK's infrastructure. Flooded with private capital and forced to compete in a newly deregulated market, BT evolved from a sluggish government bureaucracy into a competitive telecom giant. The long waiting lists vanished, replaced by rapid technological advancement and competitive consumer pricing. The story of BT is a textbook example of how introducing market competition and replacing bureaucratic box-ticking with the profit motive revives stagnant, state-controlled industries. In an age where nationalisation is back on the political agenda, it’s worth remembering.

The worst thing the Tories did, and I understand there's quite a few contenders, was to allow a broad range of mental health conditions, including minor ones, to be eligible for PIP payments.

This is the sort of thing you say when you've given up on any meaningful supply-side reform, but still want applause from midwits on Twitter. There are no empty houses in Britain. It's a complete red herring.

Every parliamentarian and policy maker should watch this 👇

The home builders are all up A LOT this morning. Eg Barratt 14%. So Labour’s Your First Home policy has done wonders for their share prices All sponsored by YOU

If you don’t rent out your property, it will be confiscated. If you do rent out your property, you are not allowed to evict your tenants, even if they fail to pay the rent. We foresee no unintended consequences.