Free Market Economics — Season 1, Episode 4: Austrian School: Part 2
Documentary, Talk • 56 min • 1 season, 10 episodes
Episode synopsis
In lecture four, we continue our study of the Austrian School of Economics through the work of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Israel Kirzner, focusing on economic calculation under socialism. We examine Mises’s argument that socialism cannot allocate resources rationally without market prices, Hayek’s explanation of how prices coordinate dispersed knowledge through spontaneous order, and Kirzner’s emphasis on entrepreneurial alertness and competition as a discovery process. The lecture concludes by highlighting how these Austrian economists demonstrated that markets succeed not through central planning but through the decentralized use of knowledge that no single authority could possess or coordinate.
About Free Market Economics
In Free Market Economics, Dr. David Henderson guides us through ten foundational pillars of economic wisdom and the major schools of thought—Austrian, Chicago, UCLA, and Public Choice. Along the way, we explore how markets coordinate through decentralized knowledge, property rights, and voluntary exchange, and why central planning so often falls short. Drawing on vivid historical cases—from the Soviet economic collapse to West Germany’s postwar miracle—the course brings core ideas like subjective value, spontaneous order, and entrepreneurial discovery to life. Ultimately, it shows how economic freedom and open inquiry fuel innovation and prosperity, while government intervention frequently produces unintended consequences and inefficiencies.