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Comment by mmonihan | Hacker News Reader

Here's a perspective from the Austrian school: https://mises.org/library/truth-about-tulipmania

You learn quickly not to mention favorably certain taboo subjects here on HN, like Austrian economics or free markets being better than regulated one. (I'll refrain from pointing out others, I want to limit the number of downvotes I get. Self-censorship or, in other words, learned helplessness.)

Look, as much as I dislike the Austrian school (it all hangs on certain premises that I don't believe are necessarily true, so I don't think it contributes much to being able to understand the economy), the main problem with the comment above was that it wasn't very useful in just dropping a link with little context... With a bit of commentary or a brief summary of the article, people would have engaged with it instead of just downvoting.

So does mainstream economics. They are both wrong.

At least the Austrian school admits they made the whole thing up in a religious fashion and never submit their ideas to actual science.

Mainstream economics just pretends it's scientific when really the whole belief structure is a house of cards in the same way

I don't disagree, I think that certain ideas from the post-Keynesian and modern monetary theory are probably the closest to actual evidence based Economics at the moment.

There no real free market. I highly encourage the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The author makes the argument that markets do not exist independently of states, or at least when they do, they exist in the vacuum of a previous state post-collapse.

It's an incredibly eye opening book that talks about debt, money, war and slavery. They are all deeply connected.

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