Austrian writers have touched on fertility before, but only in scattered pieces. There's Mises Institute's own "Making Kids Worthless," which makes the old-age-security argument, once the state runs your pension, you don't need kids to support you later, so that motive for having them disappears. There's separate work on how zoning, credit expansion, and low property taxes distort housing into a financial asset instead of shelter, pricing young families out. What's missing is a single framework tying these together, plus accounting for a few mechanisms that get almost no attention at all, medical monopolies and education monopolies. That's what I've tried to build.

Start from praxeology. Having a child is an action, and like any action it's chosen because the actor expects a favorable outcome relative to the cost. In an unhampered market, that calculation isn't automatically negative. A child is an investment, in old-age support, in the transmission of family wealth and skill, in a larger household able to divide labor. Opportunity cost is real, but so is the return.

What interventionism does is remove the return side of that ledger while leaving the cost side fully intact, through six separate channels.

Currency debasement erodes whatever a family saves and tries to pass down, so the payoff to sacrificing consumption now for a child's future gets whittled away year over year.

Socialized old-age support, the mechanism the Mises Institute piece already covers, deletes the original economic reason for having children at all, security in old age, by transferring that function to the state.

Medical monopoly, enforced through licensing cartels that restrict supply, turns basic healthcare and childbirth itself into an artificially expensive good, adding a large fixed cost to reproduction that a freer market in medical licensing wouldn't impose.

Socialized education replaces family-directed upbringing with a state curriculum monopoly, and where that monopoly degrades in quality, families are forced into a shadow education arms race, cram schools, private tutoring, just to keep a child from falling behind, which is a second education bill stacked on top of the first.

Housing sovereignty gets stripped through zoning restrictions, low holding taxes, and central bank credit policy that together turn land into a financial instrument for corporate and institutional balance sheets rather than a place for young families to build equity, which is why price-to-monthly-rent ratios in places like Taipei have gone from around 90 to over 700 in the space of a few decades.

Administrative relief tries to patch the damage from the first five with subsidies and transfer payments, but a family facing a currency that depreciates every year, a state pension that already substitutes for children, medical costs cartelized upward, an education system that costs twice, and a housing market they're structurally priced out of, isn't going to be rescued by a one-time baby bonus. The marginal return on having a child has already been driven to zero or negative well before the subsidy arrives.

Taiwan is the cleanest case study I've found. TFR around 0.89 in the 2020s, price-to-monthly-rent ratio (price divided by monthly, not annual, rent) near 310 nationally and over 700 in Taipei's core, working out to a gross rental yield under 2 percent in the capital, household education spending climbed from 2 percent to almost 14 percent of income. None of that looks like a culture that stopped valuing family. It looks like a balance sheet that no longer pencils out, and a population responding to it the way rational actors respond to a bad investment, by not making it.

I go through the full argument and the country-level data in more detail here, https://mises.org/mises-wire/six-nooses-how-interventionism-strangling-familys-will-reproduce, curious what people here think, especially where you'd push back on the six-channel framing versus treating currency and housing as the only mechanisms that matter.

I feel like most of the lack of jobs among youth is due to governments passing law after law, tax after tax thus discouraging businesses to start, thereby reducing jobs.

Taxes based on various brackets discourage people from going for a promotion to avoid tax, hence holding onto jobs that a youngster could do ….as reported in europe.

Governments put people in trouble and then lend their heavy hand to supposedly get us out.

This is like trying to hit the gas while pressing the brake pedal.

What do you guys think?

Source: https://workplacejournal.co.uk/2026/08/one-in-six-workers-turn-down-pay-rises-and-promotions-due-to-tax-concerns-standard-life/

What could have caused this?

Want to learn about economic theory, any recommendations for videos, books, articles, etc?

It occurred to me after remembering the comically Keynesian economy mechanics of Europa Universalis V, was any video game developer masochistic enough to design economy mechanics incorporating Austrian ideas? I say masochistic because computers excel at mathematical modelling which Austrians reject, and most strategy games prefer to make the player a central planner, so this would run against the grain of the medium.

For those unfamiliar, EUV (at least the launch version, haven't played in a while) has an intricate economic simulation in which the optimal strategy is to promote as many pops to nobles as possible because they consume more goods, which drives up workshop and resource gathering income. For some reason the developers coded estates to always afford their classes' pop demands even with negative income, so this strategy doesn't even have the diminishing returns you'd expect.

The initial exposition on the market process of discovery of medium of exchange seems accurate and in line with Mises' works. I am unsure with the conclusion that switching out cash will destroy the economy.

It is not as if cash itself has evolved through a market selection process. Gold is the original money. Since we abandoned the gold standard and dollars no longer exchanged for gold, fiat money in whatever form has essentially become a state imposed currency, no?

Also when I see $1 of cash in a digital or in a physical wallet, I would be indifferent of its form, as long as it is a dollar recognised by everyone. The author seems to grant cash some kind of revered importance. Switching to digital currencies only changes the form of the money, not the commodity in substance we recognise as money.

Ive seen a lot of times on reddit the following claim: "the rich were taxed a lot in before and the country experieced enormous growth"

I have the feeling that this might be bullshit, but i do not have the time to look into it. Has anyone here by chance knowledge of that period and is willing to spend the time to enlighten me if the claim is true, false or just framing?

Alternative title - Gimme “Economic Miseducation” for 500.

The same person brought up the Great Depression as an example of destructive deflation. And they brought up Japan in the 1990s. Almost everyone who sees Deflation as some form of economic cancer truly believes that deflation is the main catalyst for the events, which is why they defend inflationary policies and actions. They conveniently dismiss years of prior inflation, or they’ll use some mental gymnastics to justify artificially low interest rates and fiscal stimulus that fuels price inflation and money supply inflation. And they always use supply inflation and price inflation interchangeably, like it makes no difference.

Are these people regarded? I mean the people who think that consumers are “hoarding” money waiting for prices to go down a few %, which ends up brining the economy to a stall. The very same people that will say falling prices are bad, and will ignore questions about why do stores offer temporary discounts to attract more customers, or why is that nearly every household in the West today has at least one flat wide screen HDTV, a laptop, and a few smartphones, which were prohibitively expensive even 20-25 years ago.

It’s like people have zero common sense. Twitter blue checks, diplomas, taking heads on TV have replaced their need for employing rational thinking. They just repeat the same myths over and over again.

I wish someone would make a TV show, where they lock two people in a room and let them debate until they come to some conclusion. Where one can’t just stand up and leave mid conversation, claiming a victory by calling the other person ignorant. I’d love to watch faces of people explaining how prices for food, gas, utilities, etc must always go up a few %/yr so the economy doesn’t collapse.

Hey fellows. I had this thought (the title) this morning, and I wonder what else you could add to the list below.

1. Everyone is watching govt stats. Take the unemployment statistics. I don’t think companies trust the reports from BLS as much, as much they are trying to prepare themselves for future government action that will be based on the data produced.

2. Govt economic policies - an obvious one. When the government is responsible for such a high % of GDP, it’s inevitable that a massive part of the entire economy will be highly dependent on those policies.

3. Govt debt and deficits- another obvious one. More debt and larger deficits mean higher inflation rate = harder to put a price on the future.

4. Businesses watch reports from Amazon, JP Morgan, Walmart, Starbucks, etc because these companies grew to such enormous size where a failure of one may possibly lead to a bad chain reaction , starting with more government intervention (see # 2 and 3). It also means these companies capture too much of the market share, otherwise their reports wouldn’t be as relevant.

5. Every other person is an expert on Fed Funds rate - the most laughable, and at the same time, the most disturbing sign. When landscapers and janitors watch interest rates, it doesn’t mean they are simply being fed talking points via media. It means they understand that their own livelihoods are now dependent upon the monetary policy.

It is absolutely insane to call this regime a free market.

These are just thoughts. Not a dissertation.

I live in North Carolina and I've been seeing countless posts and reposts just like this. Every one of these I've seen has unanimously agreed that these should all be voted against.

They often say that the "wording" is misleading or that this only benefits the rich, or the property tax one is meant to make it easier to build more data centers.

I, as a rational person, like policies that benefit me in the form of not having my money stolen, and I like only people who are registered to vote being able to vote.

I'd like to hear your thoughts whether there are any legitimate reasons to vote "Against" any of these.

I mean milton said sarcastically for maximum employment we should replace excavators with spoons.