Joshua Mawhorter



Articles by Joshua Mawhorter

Marx, Class Conflict, and the Ideological Fallacy

Our present cultural landscape is filled with the language of class conflict, ideology, bias (conscious or unconscious), and the politicization of everything. While there are many contributors to this, we can largely thank (or blame) Karl Marx and his theory of class consciousness and class conflict. While not necessarily following Marx in his economics, these concepts have captured the imagination of many, especially in the modern Western world.The claim is rather simple: people are inherently biased in favor of their own “class,” whether consciously or unconsciously; therefore, whatever they claim to be “true” or “right” is simply special pleading in their own favor. In other words, people are not in search of objective truth, nor is this possible; rather, they are apologists and

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Clarifying Scarcity: The Garden of Eden

One of the first laws of economics—in fact, the condition that makes economics possible and necessary—is scarcity. On page one of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics.”While defining scarcity and its critical role in economics, I like to ask my students in a Christian school a question to tease this out: Would scarcity have existed in the Garden of Eden?

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The War of 1812 and the Panic of 1819: The Unholy Alliance between Government and Banking

War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system.—Murray N. Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United StatesGovernments have three ways to tax: direct taxes (the requirement to pay money to the government), debt (present government spending without tax revenue to pay for it with the assumption that it will be paid for in the future), and inflation (“printing money,” or the artificial expansion of money and credit beyond specie [e.g., a commodity like gold, silver, etc.]). Further, history demonstrates a tight connection between the expansion of government power, war, and the expansion of legal privileges and immunities for banks. These realities reinforce one another.War requires revenue, which is difficult to acquire from

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Experiencing the Rothbard Graduate Seminar: Who Should Apply

​Why did you want to attend RGS?
I attended the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) in 2023 for several reasons. For one, it fulfilled a requirement as one of the final classes to complete the Mises graduate program. Additionally, RGS was part of the Mises summer fellowship program, which I was also a part of this year. That said, I wanted to attend RGS because of the unique format it provides for graduate-level reading, lectures, and discussions with the professors and fellow attendees.
The readings, both required and supplemental, informed me of things I didn’t even know I needed to read. One of the underappreciated benefits of assigned reading is being told what to read by those who are well-read in the subject. For example, the supplemental reading made me aware of just the right material

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Economic Calculation Is Nonbinary

Economic calculation is not an either-or proposition. Even in so-called market economies like that of the USA, there is plenty of government intervention that distorts market processes.

Original Article: "Economic Calculation Is Nonbinary"

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Taking Back the Meaning of “Inflation”

By corrupting the meaning of inflation, mainstream economists have given a false picture of what happens when monetary authorities expand the money supply. Mises and Rothbard understood.

Original Article: "Taking Back the Meaning of "Inflation""

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Economic Calculation Is Nonbinary

One of Ludwig von Mises’s important contributions to economics was demonstrating the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. He did it by showing three necessary preconditions for the generation of meaningful market prices in the factors of production—private property, freedom of exchange, and sound money. Since socialism would, by definition, socialize the factors of production, there would be no nonarbitrary and meaningful way to calculate the prices of various factors of production, the costs of alternative plans in money prices, and expected future profits of a given plan minus the costs.
In short, when factors of production—producer goods (tools, machines, etc.)—are privately owned, there is freedom to trade property. When the economy has advanced to using money, which

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Taking Back the Meaning of “Inflation”

Words matter and definitions often become imprecise and “slippery.” There is a natural evolution of language wherein words gradually change over time, but often a key meaning gets lost and there no longer remains a single word to describe a concept. This has been the case with the common word “inflation.”
Over the last few years, I have kept a list of quotes about the accurate definition of inflation (and I am always looking for more quotes). What inspired this list was the recognition that what most people mean and understand by the word “inflation” is price inflation—increasing consumer prices. But this is not inflation; it is a consequence of inflation. In fact, a former coworker and friend asked me during the time of massive covid spending by the government, “Where is the

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