u/LibertyEconlover

This is lowkey how I felt with mainstream economics, I brought standard theory from thinkers like Thomas Sowell such as minimum wage causing unemployment, I was shut out and Thomas Sowell was called a crank. But now I know the state of things, and am not discouraged, the best quality I and Austrians have is honesty, unlike the left.
Check out left leaning economist Paul Krugman for example Paul Krugman:

Standard fundamental theory, significant historical evidence, evidence today as well States minimum wage is bad and causes unemployment. There is significant amount of empirical evidence and the best economists like Milton Friedman and sowell said minimum wage causes unemployment;
But Paul Krugman flipped notably: 1998: Criticized advocates who claimed minimum wages have no employment effects, calling it a denial of supply and demand (“the price of labor… can be set based on considerations of justice… without unpleasant side effects”). He called some of their work sloppy.
2015 onward: “There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.”

Now check this out for immigration:
Standard principles of supply and demand shows that an influx of migrant labor is going to decrease labor cost because of competition and abundance i.e. lowering the wages of domestic individuals. In the 1930s Hoover literally restricted immigration for that exact reason to prevent domestic wages from falling.
Later comes Paul Krugman: In 2006, he wrote clearly (supply and demand logic):

“Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants… we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers… so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
He also noted that many of the worst-off native-born Americans (especially high school dropouts) are hurt, particularly by Mexican immigration, and cited Borjas/Katz estimating an 8% wage boost for dropouts if not for that immigration. Net benefits to natives were tiny (fraction of 1%).

Later (especially post-2016 and in recent columns), Krugman downplays head-to-head competition, stresses complementarities (“immigrants don’t do much head-to-head competition with native-born workers”), and highlights periods of strong low-end wage growth alongside high immigration. I think the bare minimum for an economist is to not lie

So I was thinking of the standard monopoly theory presented by any economists like Rothbard or at least I heard, the simply things like buying our competitors and predatory pricing is so rare because of how unsustainable it is. Essentially for predatory pricing you first need to be able to have significant capital as a buffer to run at a loss at any given time, ignoring how money has so much more better uses than that than literally wasting it like reinvestment into better products, R&D, and shareholder payouts, a new competitor would most likely come in and drive prices down. With the threat of new entry alone being enough for a single entity to charge reasonably.

With buyouts it’s the same thing just worse, essentially if not only is it a waste of money, very expensive, it is completely unsustainable because new competitors can come in with greater motivation because they have an option of you buying them out and then they practically get free money.

Then I started thinking, if government is offering, practically guaranteed money back for giving them money, won’t that crowd out and starve private investment in the real world for those scenarios to actually occur?

Trying to compile a list here of amendments, the one I really want is economic, bureaucratic, and environmental regulation to expire every eight years automatically from taxes, Tarrifs, etc. I also want a amendment that makes it so the federal government cannot borrow money to pay for welfare programs and can only borrow money during times of war, so it’s forced to pay for it citizens if it truly wants to by plundering nations and taxing, and prohibiting state governments from borrowing money to pay for a program and only allowing them to borrow money to start it, for example, some people will not like having private school so they will insist on public education but you can’t let the government borrow constantly to fund it, but they can borrow only temporarily to start the project

Another critique of mainstream economics: I just learned something that I’ve been describing for quite a while now and it’s called physics envy of mainstream economics, essentially a desire for institutional legitimacy and professional gatekeeping rather than pure predictive success. When the models fail, the "story" changes, but the mathematical skin remains because it serves several vital roles for the institution, it’s why they’re always moving models years after knowing it’s bs from the start. Whether it be IS-LM or Pareto graphs, even though 99% of the time these mathematical models do significantly more harm than good by distorting the theory, or utilizing aggregates that act like smokescreens, in where fundamental aspects and principles are deleted from mainstream economics in the name of legitimacy.

As a result of trying to look like a hard science instead of a science of humans, a number of issues that can only be summed up as ideological capture arises.

For starters, eating scraps, eating theories presented decades ago because you dismiss theories as ideological and vague for using descriptive language no matter how profoundly to explain a complex dynamic, until finally, a more distorted less useful version of the theory in math is made. One of the best examples of this is creative destruction, the Nobel prize for creative destruction was given to three guys for mathematical modeling in 2025 even tho the concept was explained more thoroughly and profoundly, simultaneously coined by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1950s.

Another best examples is a subfield of mainstream economics, behavioral economics, literally a distorted version that is less useful than Austrian Praxeology, in where they package things that a simple person who uses praxeology can find out years later. It is noted that one of the best accomplishments of behavior economics is loss aversion, and where we have a “bias” to prevent a loss more than we have to get a gain, even if it’s equivalent numerically. This is more than obvious from praxeology, humans act purposely to remove, felt uneasiness, using scarce means and resources to achieve those desired ends, it is intuition that if we act purposely to reach a more satisfactory state of life, we would be pressured significantly more to prevent us from regressing into a less satisfactory state. Yet it is praised because it uses testing, modeling, and experiments.

Also, in the name of academic gatekeeping principles are deleted because they conflict with mathematical modeling, such as the most self evident Cantillon effect of money, and where new money that is injected into the economy benefits or disadvantages individuals disproportionately and not evenly, in favor of “money neutrality” in a vacuum. The models are bad by the way if I wasn’t clear, it hides ideological bias for government interference and meddling. Relative to simple accounting identities that actually do make a difference in making something more easy to analyze in aggregate, even if aggregates must also be paired with the analysis of the underlying structure, such as MV = PY, such simple accounting identities are actually very beneficial and to my knowledge aren’t rejected by Austrians, because accounting identities can be summarized in words.

In short, this is what is meant profoundly when short YouTube explain videos claim Austrian economics rejects mathematical modeling, but hey if you disagree, give me a mathematical model that makes it easier to understand the Cantillon effect

I was scrolling through AskEcon to look for individuals who mainstream Econ failed (everyone) to get them to post here for better explanations and answers. I stumbled upon someone asking why prices are higher, but wages aren’t? This is practically well-known you hear it all the time in social media with the left keep saying that it’s greed, but no one disagrees on the fact of things being so much more expensive, it’s well evident to every individual and what they hear from other individuals.

Unfortunately the top commenter said that’s false essentially and wages actually are rising (very short summary) adjusted for CPI. They started, of course, linking St. Louis fed sources (like the culprit would admit it but ok). No one could actually give them a truthful answer so I told them to post here and I would explain and others would chime in.

He said no thanks, i seem ideological since I’m calling their sources, BS, which they are. And I was just stumbled, how can someone cater to authority so much? It’s so self evident that people are having a hard time with prices and living expenses, but the moment someone who apparently claims to know economics uses fed sources they reject their eyes and ears? What type of placebo effect is this?

Here’s an explanation I was going to provide on such question:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/165vtEWwYTwk6HwGPliy9R5tJ1oPwgGqMimAVkvw9\_OM/edit?usp=drivesdk

It’s a polished version but in short: cpi is a flawed metric, the federal reserve increased the money supply by 40% between January 2020 to January 2022, and as a result everybody’s having a hard time living because of the Cantillon effect.

John hicks, is a Nobel prize winning economist I came to know after learning his in my opinion most important contribution to economics one that is very praxeologically minded the induced innovation hypothesis. Came to find out that he was the creator. Hicks is most famous for creating the IS-LM model (1937), which translated John Maynard Keynes’s Theory into a visual graph that became the standard. I was a bit bummed out to find this out, he was giving me stronger Austrian vibes due to his induced innovation hypothesis, so I did some more digging, and I found out. Later in life, Hicks became dissatisfied with his earlier formal models and turned toward the Austrian School, particularly their focus on how production takes place over time.

Capital and Time(1973): In this book, he explicitly attempted to resurrect and modernize Austrian capital theory. He adopted the "Neo-Austrian" label to describe his focus on the sequential process of production inputs turning into outputs over time rather than just looking at static snapshots of the economy.

This is the exact critique I’ve been giving mainstream economics for the longest time, they only look at things in snapshots. But that’s now how it works, it’s a story with dynamics.

So, mainstream economics still uses ISLM significantly, even though the creator of it himself became an Austrian who critiqued his own creation. If this doesn’t convince someone to leave mainstream economics I don’t know what will. This is practically saying, Austrians are right evidently for someone who doesn’t want to look at what we write.

It’s r/adamsmithery here, forced my brother to give me his account permanently. And here’s why.

So in my main account I got banned, because I was told to say something in Democracy of Reddit, he was banned there, and you know I got banned… yeah I forgave him and went on with ma life reading. Then I get told some illiterate dickwad decided to make a post about ME? In an economic memes sub Reddit? Right after I was banned? After he couldn’t respond to me, leaving me on read?
Helll naaawww.

And on that sub, I keep seeing people being hostile to Austrian economics. Which I still can’t understand why???
Is it because of a hero complex? Like I get, it’s boring to be told it’s best to let the private market decide constantly, but it’s also boring when you need to drink water constantly, it just is what it is, and we give arguments to back it up. You know, someone said Austrians reject everything except praxeology, which I think is utter BS since I’ve read some of their work and it’s actually very dense, but even if that was the case, how can Thomas Sowell who is heavy on evidence, still get to the same conclusions?