Mises Institute New Literature

Principles of Ethics: Anthology

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:40:40 -0500

Principles of Ethics: Anthology

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:40:30 -0500

A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:52:59 -0500

The horrors of the twentieth century could hardly have been predicted in the nineteenth century, which saw the eighteenth century end with the American Revolution bringing about the creation of the first classical liberal government in history. The twentieth century was the bloodiest in all history. More than 170 million people were killed by government with 10 million having been killed in World War I and 50 million killed in World War II. Of the 50 million killed in World War II, nearly 70 percent were innocent civilians.

Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:58:44 -0500

Politics and thieves, coercion and regulation, fascism and the Fed, centralization and liberty, workers and unions, trade and freedom, free-market achievements and government disasters in American history—this book covers it all!

Organized Crime collection of essays in the tradition of Austrian political economy—a combination of applied economics and the study of governmental reality. Unlike “mainstream” economists who are content to spin mathematical model after mathematical model which explain little or nothing about the real world, DiLorenzo’s focus has always been just the opposite—to use economic understanding to gain a better understanding of how the political-economic world works. Austrian economics is indispensable to succeed at this task.

The book is divided into six sections: “Coercion and Regulation” analyzes various aspects of government regulation of business; “Politics and Thieves” is of course about the inherent nature of government; “Centralization versus Liberty” discusses the never-ending quest by statists to monopolize and centralize political power so as to isolate themselves as much as possible from public influence; “Money and the State” describes the myriad evils of central banking, which was always thought of by its original proponents in America as an engine of corruption; “Workers and Unions” discusses various labor union myths and superstitions that too often cloud the public’s thinking about the reality of labor markets; and “Truth and Lies about Markets” is a taxonomy of some of the main market-failure myths that have long been used to illegitimately advance the cause of economic interventionism, as well as some newer ones.

In Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, Thomas J. DiLorenzo strips away the vast apparatus of establishment propaganda and exposes the government smokescreen. No statist lies are safe from his scrutiny. In his straightforward and methodical approach to uncovering truths of freedom, liberty has a champion.

Introduction: Austrian Political Economy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Section One: Coercion and Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Four Thousand Years of Price Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. The Other War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3. Who Will Regulate the Regulators?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

4. Regulation and the Stock Market. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

5. Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

6. Antitrust, Anti-Truth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

7. Antitrust Luddites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

8. Socialized Healthcare vs. the Laws of Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Section Two: Politics and Thieves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

9. Pay to Play: Why the Fuss? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

10. Fed-ACORN Criminality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

11. Price Gouging: The Real Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

12. Farmed Robbery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

13. The Founding Father of Crony Capitalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

14. The Curse of Instigationism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

15. The State’s Media Lapdogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Section Three: Centralization versus Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

16. Freedom and Federalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

17. The Origins of Nullification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

18. The Real Meaning of the Fourth of July . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

19. Electing U.S. Senators was a Bad Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

20. False Virtue: The Politics of Lying About History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

21. How (and Why) the Lincoln Myth was Invented . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

22. Centralization Lets the Worst Rise to the Top . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

23. Death by Government: The Missing Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

24. The Birth of American Imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

vii

viii · Organized Crime

25. Paul Krugman’s Politically-Correct “Civil War” Delusions . . . . . . . . . . 86

26. Grand Old Tyrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

27. Facialism: The New American System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

28. In Defense of Sedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

29. Distorting History in the Service of the State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Section Four: Money and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

30. Central Banking as an Engine of Corruption. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

31. States’ Rights vs. Monetary Monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

32. How Central Banking Hides the Cost of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

33. How the Fed Creates Unemployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

34. The Myth of a “Libertarian” Fed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

35. The Myth of the “Independent” Fed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

36. Why the Government is Responsible for the Sub-Prime

Mortgage Meltdown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Section Five: Workers and Unions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

37. The Political Economy of Government Employee Unions. . . . . . . . . . 143

38. The Inherent Violence of Unions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

39. The False Ideological Foundation of Unionism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

40. Markets, Not Unions, Give us Leisure and Safety on the Job . . . . . . . . 153

41. The Union Conspiracy Against Walmart Employees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

42. How “Sweatshops” Help the Poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Section Six: Truth and Lies about Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

43. The Truth about the “Robber Barons”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

44. The Truth about the Sherman Antitrust Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

45. The Myth of “Natural” Monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

46. The Virtues of Tax “Loopholes” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

47. Macroeconomists Discover Economics and Debunk

the New Deal (Again) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

48. Will Socialism Make You Happier? The Trojan Horse of

“Happiness Research” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

49. The Canard of “Asymmetric Information” as a Source of

Market Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

50. The Real Ethics Problem in America. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

51. The Myth of Government Job Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

52. The Myth of the Male/Female Wage Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

The Wizards of Ozymandias

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:52:53 -0500

Western Civilization--the American version in particular--is in a very turbulent and, perhaps terminal condition. The sense of civility that helps give meaning to a "civilization" is in full retreat.

Butler Shaffer has, over the course of several years, written 51 wonderful essays observing the dissolution of Western culture and civilization. They have been assembled in the The Wizards of Ozymandias a captivating work full of entertaining epigrams and anecdotes, as well as enlightening commentary on current events, and historical episodes, that will keep you engaged and immersed from the first to last page. Shaffer's intellectual prowess and deep well of life experience enlightens and rouses introspection at every turn. It is immediately evident that the author has been writing on law, economics, and history for decades. This book will challenge you to more deeply contemplate the ideals of liberty. The title may be foreboding, but for all that, the book is an uplifting and gratifying read.

In his great poem "Ozymandias" Percy Shelley pictures for us the eponymous tyrant whose arrogance of power could not save him from historical oblivion. Ozymandias is a reminder of the fragile nature of every system—be it biological, institutional, or cosmic in character. As we are learning from the advanced course in history in which we seem now to be enrolled, this precariousness also applies to civilizations. It is difficult for intelligent minds to doubt that this current system is in the process of joining Ozymandias in the dust-bin of history.

Western culture has produced material and spiritual values that have done so much to humanize and civilize mankind. Unfortunately, it has also produced highly-structured institutions and practices that not only impede, but reverse these life-enhancing qualities. Is it possible for us to energize our intelligence in order to rediscover, in the debris of our dying civilization, the requisite components for a fundamentally transformed culture grounded in free, peaceful, and productive systems that sustain rather than diminish life?

In the introduction Shaffer describes how civilizations are created by individuals. In following chapters, he explains how they are destroyed by collectives which are good for little more than the destruction of what others have created. Seen in the sharp contrasts between market economies and state socialism; the fundamental struggles are between the creative energies unleashed by liberty, and the repressive forces of politics. Shaffer explores the impact that institutionalism may have on the decline of civilization.

Shaffer methodically takes the reader through the rise and decline of Western civilization using references that range from the construction of an Islamic cultural center a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, to the BP disaster, to the 1951 motion picture, The Day the Earth Stood Stilland on to experiments in removing road signs and traffic lights.

What is likely to follow from this imminent “decline and fall?” Might the remnants of our terminal culture—like an estate bequeathed us by a rich benefactor—provide the foundations for a fundamentally transformed culture; one that does not cannibalize itself?

Can conditions of peace and liberty replace the wars, coercive regulation, and worship of violence that have combined to destroy our present civilization? The book ends with such questions, and invites the reader to contemplate how such a life-centered culture might arise.

If after reading this book you are not convinced that the fall of western civilization is upon us, don't grieve just yet! Shaffer is optimistic that such a collapse could be the turning point for a social transformation toward a society that embraces individual liberty and private property, and that is free from collectivism and institutionalization. Shaffer can already see the seeds of such a transformation.

"The new renaissance that seems to be emerging is fostered, in large part, by exponential increases in our capacities for communicating information to one another. Indeed, “information” may prove to be the “instrument of expansion” that will underlie a new culture."

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Ozymandias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xv

On the Decline and Fall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . 1
The Life and Death of Civilizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Consuming Our Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .23
A World Too Complex to be Managed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .33
The Common Good = Collectivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .37
The Dysfunctional Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43
The Silence of Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .49
Law as “Reason” or as “Violence”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Lest We Forget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59
We’re Going Away!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63
Fighting for Freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69
Orwell Lives!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
The Siege of San Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75
Suicide and the Insanity of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .79
Vonnegut on War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .83
How We Lost Our Souls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
The Wee Ones Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .89
Resisting the Deadly Virus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .91
Structuring the Instruments of Expansion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
Why TSA, Wars, State Defi ned Diets, Seat-Belt Laws, the War on Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, are Essential to the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Saving Our Brave, New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 107
“Klaatu barada nikto!”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
“Support the Shopping Mall Killers” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 117
Politics and War as Entertainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Can Liberty Be Advanced Through Violence?. . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
When the World Went Bankrupt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Civilization in Free-Fall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Obama Revives a Tradition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 145
The Irrelevance of the State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
The Hitler Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Impeach the American People! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . 159
What Did bin Laden “Deserve”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Wind Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Life is Destroying the Planet! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . 175
The Real World Order is Chaotic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Blogs or Blotto?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Bring Back Discrimination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Saving a Dying Corpse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
The Slave Mentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 203
Running on Empty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
A Black Hole on $10 Billion a Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 215
The New Geometry and the New Math . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 219
What Is Anarchy?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Anarchy in the Streets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
An Outbreak of Order in NYC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . 235
The Virtues of Smallness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 241
Increase Your Carbon Footprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 247
Overcoming Barriers to Killing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
What is to Become of the State? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 259
Civilization Collapsing, or Transforming? . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . 265
A Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Human Spirit:

The Luddites Revisited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . 279

War Collectivism

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:05:31 -0500

War Collectivism: Power, Business, and the Intellectual Class in World War I

More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system. It was a "war collectivism," a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interest through the instrumentality of the central government, which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the century.

Paperback, 134 pages, ISBN: 9781610162500
These essays appear together for the first time as War Collectivism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

War Collectivism in World War I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
World War I as Fulfillment:
Power and the Intellectuals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Piestism and Prohibition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Women at War and at the Polls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
Savings Our Boys from Alcohol and Vice . . . . . . . . . .74
The New Republic Collectivists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
Economics in Service of the State:
The Empiricism of Richard T. Ely. . . . . . . . . . . . . .94
Economics in Service of the State:
Government and Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127

War Collectivism in World War I
This is reprinted from A New History of Leviathan, Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1972), pp. 66– 110.

World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals
1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a Pacific Institute Conference on “Crisis and Leviathan,” at Menlo Park, Calif., October 1986. It appeared in print in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter, 1989). It was reprinted in John V. Denson, ed., The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997). The title of this paper is borrowed from the pioneering last chapter of James Weinstein’s excellent work, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). The last chapter is entitled, “War as Fulfillment.”

Review of Austrian Economics, Full Collection

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:47:38 -0500

Save $20.00 when you buy the complete 10 volume printed set!

All 10 KINDLE files are in the store as well for only $30.00! RAE KINDLE FULL COLLECTION.

Murray Rothbard had long dreamed of an Austrian academic journal. In 1986, his dream came true. The Mises Institute published it, and it changed everything. The Austrians could focus on internal development, highlight the contrast with the mainstream, and show their wares to the profession and the world at large.Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

The Review of Austrian Economics, was founded and edited by Murray N. Rothbard and functioned as the premier Austrian School scholarly journal between 1987 and 1997. From 1995 to 1997, it was edited by Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Joseph T. Salerno. This collection of volumes 1 through 10 was published by the Mises Institute.

The individual issues have been nearly impossible to find, until now. Today you can own the entire set, learn from the pioneering articles that Murray and his co-editors saw as crucial, and see what gave the modern Austrian movement its scholarly momentum.

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 10

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:52:49 -0500

RAE VOLUME 10

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

I. Articles

Randall G. Holcombe

1. A Theory of the Theory of Public Goods

Jörg Guido Hülsmann

2. Knowledge, Judgment, and the Use of Property

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

3. On Certainty and Uncertainty, Or: How Rational Can Our Expectations Be?

Jeffrey M. Herbener

4. The Pareto Rule and Welfare Economics

Arthur Middleton Hughes

5. The Recession of 1990: An Austrian Explanation

II. Notes and Replies

Ivan Pongracic

6. How Different Were Röpke and Mises?

Leland B. Yeager

7. Calculation and Knowledge: Let’s Write Finis

III. Book Reviews

8. Frank M. Machovec, Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics Reviewed by William D. Curl

9. Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism Reviewed by David Gordon

10. Robert Skidelsky, The Road From Serfdom: The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism Reviewed by David Gordon

I. Articles

Parth Shah

1. The Option Clause in Free-Banking Theory and History: A Reappraisal

Frank Shostak

2. In Defense of Fundamental Analysis: A Critique of the Efficient Market Hypothesis

Jacqueline R. Kasun

3. Government Family Planning: Effects and Incentives

II. Notes and Replies

Richard Vedder

4. Statistical Malfeasance and Interpreting Economic Phenomena

Lowell Gallaway

5. Some Austrian Perspectives on Unintended Consequences

Harold Demsetz

6. Block’s Erroneous Interpretations

Yuri Kuznetsov

7. Fiat Money as an Administrative Good

III. Book Reviews

8. George Reisman, Capitalism: A Complete and Integrated Understanding of the Nature and Value of Human Economic Life Reviewed by Alexander Tabarrok

9. Karen I. Vaughn, Austrian Economics in America: The Migration of a Tradition Reviewed by Robert Ekelund, Jr

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 9

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:29:19 -0500

RAE VOLUME 9

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

I.Articles

Jörg Guido Hülsmann

1.Free Banking and the Free Bankers

Salim Rashid and Abdus Samad

2.Portfolio Management of the Free Banks of Illinois:
An Examination of Historical Allegations

Walter Block and Kenneth M. Garschina

3.Hayek, Business Cycles and Fractional Reserve Banking:
Continuing the De-Homogenization Process

Pascal Salin

4.The Myth of the Income Effect

Anthony de Jasay

5.Hayek: Some Missing Pieces

David W. Boyd

6.Vertical Restraints and the Retail Free Riding Problem:
An Austrian Perspective

II.Notes and Replies

Leland B. Yeager

7.Rejoinder: Salerno on Calculation, Knowledge, and Appraisement

Joseph T. Salerno

8.A Final Word: Calculation, Knowledge, and Appraisement

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

9.Socialism: A Property or Knowledge Problem?

Jeffrey M. Herbener

10.Calculation and the Question of Arithmetic

III.Review Essays

Roger W. Garrison

11.Keynes Was a Keynesian

Murray N. Rothbard

12.Intimidation by Rhetoric

IV.Book Review

13.Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (vol. I) and Classical Economics (vol. II)
Reviewed by Leland B. Yeager

Dedicated to the Memory of Murray N. Rothbard

From the Editors

Peter G. Klein

1.Economic Calculation and the Limits of Organization

Pascal Salin

2.Cartels as Efficient Productive Structures

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

3.The Myth of Natural Monopoly

Jesús Huerta de Soto

4.New Light on the Prehistory of the Theory of Banking and the School of Salamanca

George Selgin and Lawrence H. White

5.In Defense of Fiduciary Media—or, We Are Not Devo(lutionists), We Are Misesians!

Roger W. Garrison

6.Central Banking, Free Banking, and Financial Crises

Richard E. Wagner

7.Who Owes What, and To Whom? Public Debt, Ricardian Equivalence, and Governmental Form

Israel M. Kirzner

8.Reflections on the Misesian Legacy in Economics

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 8

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:06:24 -0500

RAE VOLUME 8

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

I. Articles

Roger W. Garrison

1.The Federal Reserve: Then and Now

Don Bellante

2.Sticky Wages, Efficiency Wages, and Market Process

Walter Block

3.Total Repeal of Antitrust Legislation: A Critique of Bork, Brozen, and Posner

Joseph T. Salerno

4.Ludwig von Mises’s Monetary Theory in Light of Modern Monetary Thought

David Gordon

5.Justice and Redistributive Taxation: James Buchanan versus Ludwig von Mises

Editorial

1.Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Joseph T. Salerno

I. Articles

John B. Egger

2.Arthur Marget in the Austrian Tradition of the Theory of Money

Jesús Huerta de Soto

3.A Critical Analysis of Central Banks and Fractional-Reserve Free Banking from the Austrian Perspective

Murray N. Rothbard

4.Egalitarianism and the Elites

II. Notes and Replies

Walter Block

5.Ethics, Efficiency, Coasian Property Rights and Psychic Income: A Reply to Harold Demsetz

Nicolai Juul Foss

6.Information and the Market Economy: A Note on a Common Marxist Fallacy

III. Book Review

7. James M. Buchanan, Ethics and Economic Progress Reviewed by David Gordon

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 7

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:49:03 -0500

RAE VOLUME 7

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

I.Articles

Paul A. Cantor

1.Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics

Nicolai Juul Foss

2.The Theory of the Firm: The Austrians as Precursors and Critics of Contemporary Theory

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

3.F. A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique

David Gordon

4.The Philosophical Contributions of Ludwig von Mises

John B. Egger

5.The Contributions of W. H. Hutt

II.Note

Kenneth K. Sanders

6.A Note on Jean-Baptiste Say and Carl Menger Regarding Value

III.Book Review

7.Mark A. Kleiman, Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results
Reviewed by Mark Thornton

I.Articles

Robert Higgs

1.Banning a Risky Product Cannot Improve Any Consumer’s Welfare (Properly Understood), with Applications to FDA Testing Requirements

Mark Thornton

2.Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

3.How is Fiat Money Possible?
—or, The Devolution of Money and Credit

Murray N. Rothbard

4.The Consumption Tax: A Critique

II.Notes and Replies

Leland B. Yeager

5.Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge

Joseph T. Salerno

6.Reply to Leland B. Yeager

Barry Smith

7.The Philosophy of Austrian Economics

David Gordon

8.Second Thoughts on The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 6

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:22:13 -0500

RAE VOLUME 6

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

I.Articles

Joseph T. Salerno

1.The Development Of Keynes’s Economics: From Marshall To Millennialism

Murray N. Rothbard

2.How and How Not To Desocialize

Jeffrey M. Herbener

3.The Role of Entrepreneurship in Desocialization

II.Review Essay

Murray N. Rothbard

4.Aurophobia: or, Free Banking on What Standard?
A Review of Gold, Greenbacks, and the Constitution, by Richard H. Timberlake

III.Book Reviews

5.Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law Reviewed by David Gordon

6.Paul Edward Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory Reviewed by David Gordon

7.Donald R. Hoke, Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector Reviewed by Murray N. Rothbard

8.David Schmidtz, The Limits of Government Reviewed by David Gordon

I.Articles

Larry J. Eshelman

1.Ludwig von Mises on Principle

Bruce L. Benson

2.The Impetus for Recognizing Private Property and Adopting Ethical Behavior in a Market Economy: Natural Law, Government Law, or Evolving Self-interest

Donald J. Boudreaux and Thomas J. DiLorenzo

3. The Protectionist Roots of Antitrust

II.Review Essays

David Gordon

4.Toward a Deconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics

Joseph T. Salerno

5.Mises and Hayek Dehomogenized

III.Book Reviews

6.Tibor Machan, Capitalism and Individualism Reviewed by David Gordon

7.Henry B. Veatch, Swimming Against the Tide in Contemporary Philosophy Reviewed by David Gordon

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 5

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:56:22 -0500

RAE VOLUME 5

Murray Rothbard had long dreamed of an Austrian academic journal. In 1986, his dream came true. The Mises Institute published it, and it changed everything. The Austrians could focus on internal development, highlight the contrast with the mainstream, and show their wares to the profession and the world at large.

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

The individual issues have been nearly impossible to find, until now. Today you can own the entire set, learn from the pioneering articles that Murray and his co-editors saw as crucial, and see what gave the modern Austrian movement its scholarly momentum.

^The Review of Austrian Economics

Volume 5, Number 1

I.Articles

1.Eighteen Problematic Propositions in the Analysis of the Growth of Government

Robert Higgs

2.An Evolutionary Contractarian View of Primitive Law: The Institutions and Incentives Arising Under Customary Indian Law

Bruce L. Benson

3.Austrian Capital and Interest Theory: Wieser’s Contribution and the Menger Tradition

A. M. Endres

4.New Classical and Old Austrian Economics: Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory in Perspective

Roger W. Garrison

II.Review Essay

5.Marxism, Capitalism and Mercantilism A Review of Traders Versus the State by Garcia Clark

David Osterfeld

III.Book Reviews

6.Israel M. Kirzner, Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice

Reviewed by David Gordon

7.Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics

Reviewed by David Gordon

8.Robert Formaini, The Myth of Scientific Public Policy

Reviewed by David Gordon

9.Morris Silver, Foundations of Economic Justice

Reviewed by David Gordon

^The Review of Austrian Economics

Volume 5, Number 2

I. Articles

1.The Great Depression of 1946

Richard K. Vedder and Lowell Gallaway

2.Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics

Jeffrey M. Herbener

3.The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited

Murray N. Rothbard

4.De-Socialization in a United Germany

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

II. Notes and Replies

5.The Preferred Tax Type: Comment on Herbener

Alexander Tabarrok

6.Comment on Preferred Tax Type: Reply to Tabarrok

Jeffrey M. Herbener

III. Book Reviews

7.Bettina Bien Greaves, ed., Ludwig von Mises, Economic, Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays

Reviewed by Roger W. Garrison

8.Donald N. McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise

Reviewed by David Gordon

9.Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State

Reviewed by David Gordon

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 4

Mon, 07 May 2012 17:49:23 -0500

RAE VOLUME 4

Murray Rothbard had long dreamed of an Austrian academic journal. In 1986, his dream came true. The Mises Institute published it, and it changed everything. The Austrians could focus on internal development, highlight the contrast with the mainstream, and show their wares to the profession and the world at large.

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

The individual issues have been nearly impossible to find, until now. Today you can own the entire set, learn from the pioneering articles that Murray and his co-editors saw as crucial, and see what gave the modern Austrian movement its scholarly momentum.

The Review of Austrian Economics
Volume 4

I. Articles

1.Eugen Richter and Late German Manchester Liberalism: A Reevaluation

Ralph Raico

2.Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist

Joseph T. Salerno

3.Banking, Nation States and International Politics:
A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

4.National Goods versus Public Goods: Defense, Disarmament, and Free Riders

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

5.Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist

Murray N. Rothbard

6.The Subjectivist Roots of James Buchanan’s Economics

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

II.Notes and Comments

7.The DMVP-MVP Controversy: A Note

Walter Block

8.Misconceptions about Austrian Business Cycle Theory: A Comment

James Clark and James Keeler

III.Book Reviews

9.Gary B. Madison. Understanding: A Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis

Reviewed by David Gordon

10.Thomas Sowell. A Conflict of Visions

Reviewed by David Gordon

11.David Conway. A Farewell to Marx

Reviewed by David Gordon

12.Richard L. Lucier. The International Political Economy of Coffee

Reviewed by E. C. Pasour, Jr.

13.Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., eds. Man, Economy, and Liberty

Reviewed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 3

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:21:29 -0500

RAE VOLUME 3

Murray Rothbard had long dreamed of an Austrian academic journal. In 1986, his dream came true. The Mises Institute published it, and it changed everything. The Austrians could focus on internal development, highlight the contrast with the mainstream, and show their wares to the profession and the world at large.

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

The individual issues have been nearly impossible to find, until now. Today you can own the entire set, learn from the pioneering articles that Murray and his co-editors saw as crucial, and see what gave the modern Austrian movement its scholarly momentum.

Contents

In Memory

A Tribute to W.H. Hutt

Morgan O. Reynolds

I.Articles

1.The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle in the Light of Modern Macroeconomics

Roger W. Garrison

2.A Subjectivist Perspective on the Economics of Crime

Samuel Cameron

3.The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics

Murray N. Rothbard

4.Antitrust Reform: Predatory Practices and the Competitive Process

Dominick T. Armentano

5.Why the U.S. Economy Is Not Depression-Proof

Mark Skousen

6.The Efficient-Markets Hypothesis and Entrepreneurship

E.C.Pasour, Jr.

7.Trade Unions: The Private Use of Coercive Power

W.H. Hut^†

II.Notes and Replies

8.Mises on the Evenly Rotating Economy

J. Patrick Gunning

9.Subjective Cost Revisited

William Barnett II

10.Reply to Comment by William Barnett II

Leland B. Yeager

11.Comment on Tullock’s “Why Austrians Are Wrong About Depressions”

Joseph T. Salerno

12.Reply to Comment by Joseph T. Salerno

Gordon Tullock

13.Comment on Professor Timberlake’s Squared Rule for the Equilibrium Value for the Marginal Utility of Money

William Barnett II

14.Marginal Utility Equilibrium between Money and Goods: A Reply to Professor Barnett’s Criticism

Richard H. Timberlake, Jr.

15.Professor Caldwell on Ludwig von Mises’ Methodology

J. Patrick Gunning

III.Book Review Essays

16.In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

17.A Look at Subjectivism, Intelligibility and Economic Understanding: Essays in Honor of Ludwig M. Lachmann on his Eightieth Birthday

Walter Block

IV.Book Reviews

18.You’ll Find It in The New Palgrave

Mark Skousen

19.The Origins of Language: A Review

David Gordon

20.The Politics of Hunger: A Review

Ralph Raico

About the Contributors

About the Editors

In Memory

A Tribute to W.H. Hutt

Morgan O. Reynolds

I.Articles

1.The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle in the Light of Modern Macroeconomics

Roger W. Garrison

2.A Subjectivist Perspective on the Economics of Crime

Samuel Cameron

3.The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics

Murray N. Rothbard

4.Antitrust Reform: Predatory Practices and the Competitive Process

Dominick T. Armentano

5.Why the U.S. Economy Is Not Depression-Proof

Mark Skousen

6.The Efficient-Markets Hypothesis and Entrepreneurship

E.C.Pasour, Jr.

7.Trade Unions: The Private Use of Coercive Power

W.H. Hut^†

II.Notes and Replies

8.Mises on the Evenly Rotating Economy

J. Patrick Gunning

9.Subjective Cost Revisited

William Barnett II

10.Reply to Comment by William Barnett II

Leland B. Yeager

11.Comment on Tullock’s “Why Austrians Are Wrong About Depressions”

Joseph T. Salerno

12.Reply to Comment by Joseph T. Salerno

Gordon Tullock

13.Comment on Professor Timberlake’s Squared Rule for the Equilibrium Value for the Marginal Utility of Money

William Barnett II

14.Marginal Utility Equilibrium between Money and Goods: A Reply to Professor Barnett’s Criticism

Richard H. Timberlake, Jr.

15.Professor Caldwell on Ludwig von Mises’ Methodology

J. Patrick Gunning

III.Book Review Essays

16.In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

17.A Look at Subjectivism, Intelligibility and Economic Understanding: Essays in Honor of Ludwig M. Lachmann on his Eightieth Birthday

Walter Block

IV.Book Reviews

18.You’ll Find It in The New Palgrave

Mark Skousen

19.The Origins of Language: A Review

David Gordon

20.The Politics of Hunger: A Review

Ralph Raico

About the Contributors

About the Editors

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 2

Mon, 07 May 2012 13:42:07 -0500

RAE VOLUME 2

Murray Rothbard had long dreamed of an Austrian academic journal. In 1986, his dream came true. The Mises Institute published it, and it changed everything. The Austrians could focus on internal development, highlight the contrast with the mainstream, and show their wares to the profession and the world at large.

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

The individual issues have been nearly impossible to find, until now. Today you can own the entire set as digital books, learn from the pioneering articles that Murray and his co-editors saw as crucial, and see what gave the modern Austrian movement its scholarly momentum.

Contents

1.The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Austrians

Israel M. Kirzner

2.Praxeology and Understanding: An Analysis of the Controversy in Austrian Economics

G.A. Selgin

3.Competition and Political Entrepreneurship: Austrian Insights into Public-Choice Theory

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

4.Why the Austrians Are Wrong About Depressions

Gordon Tullock

5.“Social Utility” and Government Transfers of Wealth: An Austrian Perspective

David Osterfeld

6.Austrian Methodology: The Preferred Tax Type

Jeffrey Herbener

7.The Neglect of the French Liberal School in Anglo-American Economics: A Critique of Received Explanations

Joseph T. Salerno

8.The Austrian Economists and the Late Hapsburg Viennese Milieu

Arthur M. Diamond, Jr.

Notes and Replies

9.Hayek’s “The Trend of Economic Thinking”

Bruce J. Caldwell

10.Timberlake on the Austrian Theory of Money: A Comment

Murray N. Rothbard

11.Reply to Comment by Murray N. Rothbard

Richard H. Timberlake, Jr.

12.On Yeager’s “Why Subjectivism?”

Walter Block

13.Reply to Comment by Walter Block

Leland B. Yeager

14.Saving the Depression: A New Look at World War II

Mark Skousen

Book Reviews

15.The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland

Murray N. Rothbard

16.White’s Free-Banking Thesis: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Larry J. Sechrest

17.A Critique of What Do Unions Do?

Morgan Reynolds

18.The Crash and Its Aftermath: A Review Article

Clifford F. Thies

19.Berger on Capitalism

David Gordon

About the Contributors

About the Editors

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 1

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:35:48 -0500

RAE VOLUME 1

Murray Rothbard had long dreamed of an Austrian academic journal. In 1986, his dream came true. The Mises Institute published it, and it changed everything. The Austrians could focus on internal development, highlight the contrast with the mainstream, and show their wares to the profession and the world at large.

Rothbard was an exacting editor, and results are spectacular and historic.

The Review of Austrian Economics, was founded and edited by Murray N. Rothbard and functioned as the premier Austrian School scholarly journal between 1987 and 1997. From 1995 to 1997, it was edited by Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Joseph T. Salerno. This collection of volumes 1 through 10 was published by the Mises Institute.

The individual issues have been nearly impossible to find, until now. Today you can own the entire set, learn from the pioneering articles that Murray and his co-editors saw as crucial, and see what gave the modern Austrian movement its scholarly momentum.

Contents

Introductory Editorial

Murray N. Rothbard and Walter Block

Editorial: The Inflationary Chaos Ahead

Henry Hazlitt

1.Why Subjectivism?

Leland Yeager

2.Wages, Prices, and Employment: Von Mises and the Progressives

Lowell Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder

3.A Critique of Monetarist and Austrian Doctrines on the Utility and Value of Money

Richard H. Timberlake, Jr.

4.Breaking Out of the Walrasian Box: The Cases of Schumpeter and Hansen

Murray N. Rothbard

5.Two Forgotten Articles by Ludwig von Mises on the Rationality of Socialist Economic Calculation

William Keizer

6.Rent Seeking: Some Conceptual Problems and Implications

E.C. Pasour, Jr.

7.Some Austrian Perspectives on Keynesian Fiscal Policy and the Recovery in the Thirties

Gene Smiley

8.GNP, PPR, and the Standard of Living

Robert Batemarco

I.Review Essays

9.The Economics of Time and Ignorance: A Review

Charles W. Baird

10.Method versus Methodology: A Note on The Ultimate Resource

M.W. Sinnett

II.Reviews

11.The Evolution of Cooperation

Roger Arnold

12.Competition versus Monopoly: Combines Policy in Perspective

Roger Arnold

13.A Response to the Framework Document for Amending the Combines Investigation Act

Roger Arnold

14.Writing History: Essay on Epistemology

Edward H. Kaplan

15.The Unseen Dimensions of Wealth: Towards a Generalized Economic Theory

Edward H. Kaplan

About the Contributors

About the Editor

Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought (Complete, 1965-1968)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:26:11 -0500

The most influential and famous low-circulation, typewriter-typed scholarly journal of the 20th century.

Lessons for the Young Economist Teacher's Manual

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:25:19 -0600

This is the teacher's manual to accompany the student textbook, Lessons for the Young Economist. View the textbook Lessons for the Young Economist here.

The manual follows the student text very closely (the student text is needed separately, either in physical form or PDF). For each section within a chapter, the manual may give the historical context, clarify the relationship between what the student is learning from the text compared to a typical college textbook, warn about possible confusions the student may encounter, or give links for further reading for the teacher’s own edification (not necessarily to be assigned to the student).

In addition, this manual provides thorough answers to the study Questions found at the back of each Lesson in the student text. The manual also lists optional supplemental materials, such as free online videos, audio lectures, and readings, along with instructions as to their level of difficulty and relevance. The manual also provides sample tests and even suggested activities (ideal for homeschooling parents) to illustrate the concepts in each chapter.

The manual can be used by any teacher, but it is ideal for the homeschooling parent who needs guidance in developing a curriculum for the junior high student involving economics.

Spiral bound
428 pages
ISBN: 9781610162043

TEST DOCUMENT - IGNORE

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:29:32 -0600
TEST TEST TEST

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:48:04 -0600

Here is the book to learn classical liberalism from the ground up, written by the foremost historian in the Austrian tradition--Ralph Raico. Every student, scholar, and freedom fan must have a copy of Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School at hand, readying them for intellectual battle!

It is indeed rare to study directly under two giants of the Austrian School. Raico wrote his dissertation under the direction of F.A. Hayek at the University of Chicago after being admitted as a high school student to Ludwig von Mises’s NYU seminar in New York. Raico and his friend and fellow Mises seminar attendee, Murray Rothbard, would turn into the modern champions of true liberalism.

Raico takes on all comers, disposing of all opponents of the market from Keynesians to Marxists and everyone in between, with crackling prose and sizzling wit. The liberal history comes alive with Raico’s pen, and at the same time quenches the reader’s thirst for detail, infusing an excitement that urges the reader to further explore.

Raico’s breadth of scholarship is on full display, combining insights and arguments from disparate points. He provides clarity to a history that is often slanted and distorted. Multiple reference lists contained in the book will serve as a classical liberal treasure trove for students and scholars for decades to come.

In his foreword, Austrian School scholar Jörg Guido Hülsmann, credits Raico with educating modern Germans about fellow countryman and forgotten liberal champion, Eugen Richter. Furthermore, the book’s preface by Raico’s friend and colleague, David Gordon, is both extensive and illuminating.

ISBN: 9781610160032
372 pages

Economics in One Lesson

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:57:51 -0600

Here is a publishing event: the new Mises Institute edition of the classic book that has taught many millions sound economic thinking. It is a hardbound volume, priced very low thanks to special benefactors, and now available in quantity discounts for distribution to your friends, family, and anyone you meet who needs to understand what economics implies for the society, government, and civilization.

Henry Hazlitt wrote this book following his stint at the New York Times as an editorialist. His hope was to reduce the whole teaching of economics to a few principles and explain them in ways that people would never forget. It worked. He relied on some stories by Bastiat and his own impeccable capacity for logical thinking and crystal-clear prose.

He was writing under the influence of Mises himself, of course, but he brought his own special gifts to the project. As just one example, this is the book that made the idea of the "broken window fallacy" so famous.
What thrills us in particular about this new edition is that it is beautiful, it is hardcover, and it is newly typeset for modern readers. It has a full index. It includes a wonderful foreword by Walter Block. It's the right size, shape, and feel – perfect for making this book central to all educational efforts of the future.

This is the book to send to reporters, politicians, pastors, political activists, teachers, or anyone else who needs to know.

Professor Block explains that it was this book that turned him on to economics as a science. He believes that it is probably the most important economics book ever written in the sense that it offers the greatest hope to educating everyone about the meaning of the science.

Written for the non-academic, it has served as the major antidote to fallacies in the popular press, and has appeared in dozens of languages and printings. It's still the quickest way to learn how to think like an economist. And this is why it has been used in the best classrooms more than sixty years.

Many writers have since attempted to beat this book as an introduction, but have never succeeded. Hazlitt's book remains the best. Even if you own this book already, or have several past editions, you will want to have this book as your own as a wonderful testament to its place in the world of ideas.

In putting this edition together, we chose to work from Hazlitt's own first edition because it contains the core of what is crucial here without later updates that only date the book. As with Mises and Human Action, the author's first instincts were the best ones.

Contents:

Part One: The Lesson
Part Two: The Lesson Applied

The Broken Window
The Blessings of Destruction
Public Works Mean Taxes
Taxes Discourage Production
Credit Diverts Production
The Curse of Machinery
Spread-the-Work Schemes
Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats
The Fetish of Full Employment
Who's "Protected" by Tariffs?
The Drive for Exports
"Parity" Prices
Saving the X Industry
How the Price System Works
"Stabilizing" Commodities
Government Price-Fixing
Minimum Wage Laws
Do Unions Really Raise Wages?
"Enough to Buy Back the Product"
The Function of Profits
The Mirage of Inflation
The Assault on Savings
The Lesson Restated

The Pure Time-Preference Theory of Interest

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:36:05 -0600

It’s about time. Really! An entire book fleshing out the pure time-preference theory of interest has finally been assembled. The present crop of Keynesians play with interest rates believing they can create prosperity without a sound theoretical basis for how the market determines rates. It is the Austrian insight that present goods have a higher value than future goods, while the followers of Lord Keynes foolishly try to abolish human action.

Giants of the Austrian world have been assembled for the task, along with a fresh new introduction by Jeffrey Herbener. Rothbard, Mises, Garrison, Kirzner and Fetter systematically provide the underpinnings of a theory that, as Israel Kirzner writes, “for almost a century a particular theory of interest has been again and again discussed, refuted, defended, ignored, forgotten, and rediscovered; somehow it has managed to survive.”

Find out why!

From Douglas French’s foreward:

The following essays parse through the uniquely Austrian insight of the pure time-preference theory of interest, but more importantly go to the core of why modern central bank monetary engineering leaves the economy further from recovery while at the same time providing a Petri dish for speculation and malinvestment.

• Foreword by Douglas E. French
• Introduction by Jeffrey M. Herbener

Time Preference - By Murray N. Rothbard

Human Action: The Rate of Interest - By Ludwig von Mises

In Defense of the Misesian Theory of Interest - By Roger W. Garrison

The Pure Time-Preference Theory of Interest: An Attempt at Clari?cation - By Israel M. Kirzner

Interest Theories, Old and New - By Frank A. Fetter

Professor Rothbard and the Theory of Interest - By Roger W. Garrison

• Bibliography
• Index

Mises on Money

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:05:49 -0600

Before Austrian economics came on the scene, monetary theory was a hodge-podge of disjointed insights. Nobody knew how to integrate those insights into a system, much less how to integrate monetary theory with the rest of economics.
Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics, started to unravel the mystery of money in the late 19th century. Ludwig von Mises finally cut the Gordian knot with his first magnum opus, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), the most important single advance in monetary theory in the history of economic thought.
In that treatise, Mises erected a theory of money of astounding originality that was complete and internally integrated: as well as externally integrated with modern, subjectivist economics in general. With this book, Mises completed the victory of the "marginal revolution" by extending its conquest to the monetary realm. In doing so, Mises finally made economics whole. In his later treatise, Human Action, Mises developed his theory further, making it even more rigorous.
While Mises' monetary writings should be required reading for any educated citizen, it can be challenging to parse some of the technical language. That is where Gary North comes in. In Mises on Money, Dr. North lucidly explains all the essential tenets of Mises' monetary theory, with his inimitable incisiveness and style. He methodically walks the reader through such topics as the origin of money, Mises' "regression theorem", fractional reserve banking, and the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. He explains why money is not "neutral," and why price stabilization is a chimera. After reading this short work, you will have a firm understanding of Austrian monetary theory, and will be in prime condition to tackle Mises' own writings on the subject.
Dr. North writes:

"In summarizing Mises's theory of money, I cover five themes: the definition of money; the optimum quantity of money and its corolary, stable prices; fractional reserve banking, and how to inhibit it; and the monetary theory of the business cycle. They are closely interrelated. Mises's system was a system."

144 pages
Paperback
Published: 2012
ISBN: 9781610162487

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Money: A Market-Generated Phenomenon . . . . . . . . 15
The Optimum Quantity of Money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Two Myths: Neutral Money and Stable Prices . . . . . . 55
Fractional Reserve Banking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
The Monetary Theory of the Business Cycle . . . . . . . 99
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Liberalismo e Anarcocapitalismo: La Scuola Austriaca di Economia

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:37:50 -0600
Editors: Dario Antiseri, Enzo Di Nuoscio, Francesco Di Iorio (eds) http://www.nuovaciviltadellemacchine.it/

The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:19:01 -0600

This book is one of the most significant ever written by Denson. It contains essays that have been turned into major movies and documentaries, and influenced politics in ways no one could have expected. The thesis in brief: the warfare stat is as great or greater threat to liberty than the welfare state. Lovers of freedom need to focus their energies in favor of peace and against war.
Further, there can be no reconciling freedom and empire.
The 2nd edition is expanded to include an additional essay on World War I by Ralph Raico and another by David Gordon on war propaganda. Other contributors include Murray N. Rothbard and Robert Higgs.
"An original and scholarly appraisal of America's wars and their consequences, The Costs of War is easily one of the most important books to emerge from American conservatives in a generation...." Thomas Woods, Modern Age
"John Denson's The Costs of War offers a devastating critique of Washington's interventionist tendencies. The book, a series of conference papers, shows how, for instance, the Civil War sparked the federal government's (still ongoing) centralization of power and how World War I reflected the triumph of collectivism." Doug Bandow, World
"This book is the most convincing attack on the warmongering state to appear since the end of the Second World War." Gerard Radnitsky, Neuezuericher Zeitung.

This essential volume contains:

War and American Freedom (John V. Denson)
Classical Republicanism and the Right to Bear Arms (Samuel Francis)
Defenders of the Republic: The Anti-Interventionist Tradition in American Politics (Justin Raimondo)
America's Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861 (Murray N. Rothbard)
Rethinking Lincoln (Richard Gamble)
Did the South Have to Fight? (Thomas Fleming)
War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic (Clyde Wilson)
The Spanish-American War as Trial Run, or Empire as Its Own Justification (Joseph R. Stromberg)
World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals (Murray N. Rothbard)
Rethinking Churchill (Ralph Raico)
The Old Breed and the Costs of War (Eugene B. Sledge)
War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone (Robert Higgs)
The Military as an Engine of Social Change (Allan Carlson)
His Country's Own Heart's-Blood: American Writers Confront War (Bill Kauffman)
The Culture of War (Paul Fussell)
Is Modern Democracy Warlike? (Paul Gottfried)
War and the Money Machine: Concealing the Costs of War Beneath the Veil of Inflation (Joseph T. Salerno)
Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization: From Monarchy to Democracy (Hans-Hermann Hoppe)

Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:21:39 -0500

A lone voice of economic sanity in the United States after World War II was Henry Hazlitt, who had moved in 1946 from the New York Times editorial page to Newsweek magazine, where he wrote until the late 1960s. He wrote a column every week on the most important economic topic being discussed in politics and the media. Each column was about 800 words, and each taught a lesson using logic and evidence. His column was always a wonderful annoyance to the political class and a ray of bright light for freedom lovers everywhere.

None of these columns has appeared in print since. Business Tides brings them all back to light in a gorgeous and easy-to-read format, arranged from the first to the last. The topics are the same ones that are in the news today: deficits, spending, tariffs and trade, inflation and the gold standard, wage and price controls, regulations, presidential intervention, stimulus and laissez-faire, and government spending on research.

Reading this book is like getting your own personal guided tour of the economic history of the postwar world. It enlightens on every page. It is a kind of "live blog" of the entire period of history. Hazlitt's tone is always sober, stable, and fluid, with a timeless quality that impresses the reader with its logic and erudition. It appears on issue after issue, in every article without exception.

Of course you can turn to any page and enjoy his commentary. But it is especially interesting to read the articles in sequence, because quite often Hazlitt elaborates on particular points as a debate developments and then he further refines his points in light of critics. Reading the articles in this way, the reader gains a through understanding of the topic in question.

The real beauty of this volume — which is an amazing 900-page hardback with a two-column layout — is that it rescues from history some of the most powerful and important economic commentary ever. It came about during the great transition out of the war and into peaceful economic planning of the sort inspired by Keynes. Hazlitt fought it every step of the way, valiantly and with the cool light of reason and wisdom. We will never know for sure how many bad policies were stopped by his writing, but he sure did leave a wonderful legacy for future generations.

Paul Charles Milazzo of the University of Ohio writes the comprehensive introduction based on the archives.

It also features a detailed index.

Liberty Magazine 22.6

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:53:19 -0500
Salesman, Stalwarts and Old Pols, Bruce Ramsey; Libertarian Like Me, Sandy Shaw; The Housing Bubble and Bust, Edmund Contoski; How to Think About Pollution, David Friedman; The American Revolution: Right or Wrong?, Ronald Hamowy; Summer Books, Liberty's Editors and Contributors; Liberation Theology vs. McDonald's, Doug Casey; When Theories Collide, Jo Ann Skousen; Should Ben Stein Be Expelled?, Mark Rand; Iron and Dynamite, Jo Ann Skousen; Dissent for Me, Not Thee, Gary Jason; Too Smart for Its Own Good, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.11

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:56:34 -0500
Cuba: Change We Can Count On?, Robert H. Miller; An Experiment in Apocalypse, Stephen Cox; The Queen of Africa, Jacques Delacroix; Obamacare: The Fine Print, Steve Murphy; Whatever Happened to Integrity?, Jim Walsh; The Case for Free Trade, Gary Jason; The Way to Wealth, Bruce Ramsey; Greed Is Still Good, Jo Ann Skousen; Against the Grain, Gary Jason; Tragedy on the Commons; The Bogus Letter; The Boys of Boston; This Is Not a Pipe, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.10

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:55:18 -0500
Obama the Ordinary, Wayland Hunter; Drill Deep, Drill Smart, Gary Jason; Slippery Slope, Jacques Delacroix; Working for Liberty, Tom Palmer; The Importance of Being Ignorant, Aaron Ross Powell; I Was a Teenage Liberal, Robert P. Marcus; Starting a Movement, Stephen Cox; Grave Doubts; Everything But "Think"; Selling Out; Hambo, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.9

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:53:26 -0500
Don't Default on Me, Bruce Ramsey; Seeds of Liberty, Wayne Thorburn; Ends and Means, Stephen Cox; Pearl Harbor, Jane S. Shaw; The Beck Files, Robert Chatfield; Away From It All, Bruce Ramsey; Galt's Glitch; Saline Dissolution; Thriller for the Thinker; Fun and French, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.8

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:51:51 -0500
Off the Rails, Randal O'Toole; Health, or Share the Wealth?, Steve Murphy; Complexity and Liberty, Charles Barr; Stray Facts, Stephen Cox; In Vino Libertas, Michael Christian; Radio Free Santa Cruz, Jacques Delacroix; A Continent Adrift, Robert Chatfield; Animal Harm, Gary Jason; Over the Pop, Alec Mouhibian; Paean to the Individual; Masterpiece of Suspense; Squatter's Delight, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.7

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:50:31 -0500
The Crisis in Higher Education, Wayland Hunter; Broadening the Appeal of Liberty, Russell Hasan; Patchwork Planet, Jacques Delacroix; Judgment Call, Bruce Ramsey; Robin Hood, Revised, Jo Ann Skousen; Art for the Sake of Art, Gary Jason; Get Over It, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.6

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:48:53 -0500
Naming Names, Bruce Ramsey; Presumption of Competence, Wendy McElroy; The Farthest Shores of Propaganda, Stephen Cox; Zoophobia, Jerry E. Ellison Jr., The Books of Summer, Liberty's Editors and Contributors; Psychology Grows Up, Jamie McEwan; Planeteers; Sleeper-Cell Marketing, Jo Ann Skousen; On the Road Again, Gary jason; Acting Like Ourselves; Timeless Problems, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 24.5

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:47:15 -0500
The Move Toward National Land-Use Planning, Randal O'Toole; Empowering the Libertarian Minority, Charles Barr; You Say You Want a Revolutin, Jay Fisher; Watershed, Jacques Delacroix; Dead or Alive?, Robert Watts Lamon; Bank Shot, Robert Chatfield; Postmodern Pegasus, Jo Ann Skousen; Last Rites, Gary Jason

Liberty Magazine 24.4

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:45:53 -0500
Obamalaise, Gary Jason; Creating Paradise, Jeff Wrobel; Marketing Morality, Brian J. Gladish; The View from Lulu's, Jacques Delacroix; Alverna's World: A Small Town in 1920, Bruce Ramsey; Chavez Says, Michael Owen; Preaching to the Unconverted, Lori Heine; The Shape of Things to Come, Robert Chatfield; Why Jonny Cant Reed, Gary Jason; Viral Marketing, Patrick Quealy; The Wonder is Gone; The Haunting of Tony Blair, Jo Ann Skousen

Liberty Magazine 1.1

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:32:55 -0500
The Films of Ayn Rand, Stephen Cox; The Mystery Man of the Libertarian Movement, R.W. Bradford, Benjamin Best, and Tom Marshall; Witch-Bashing, Book-Burning, and Professor Harold Hill's Lessons in Practical Politics, Butler D. Shaffer; Options, Jo McIntyre; The Libertarians' Quandary, Chester Alan Arthur; Life or Death in Seattle, Murray N. Rothbard; The Matter of America, David Sheldon

Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:54:21 -0500
NY: Devin-Adair, 1947

Effects of the War on the Money, Banking, Credit System of the United States

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:39:27 -0500

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume IV

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:25:32 -0500
London School of Economics, 1934

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume III

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:24:41 -0500
London School of Economics, 1934

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume II

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:22:46 -0500
London School of Economics, 1934

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume I

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:21:06 -0500
London School of Economics, 1934

The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865-1914

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 12:47:53 -0500

The Gilded Age, lasting from 1865 to World War I, was an era of economic growth never before seen in the history of the world. The standard of living of the modern age was born during this time of phenomenal transition. Lives lengthen. Wealth exploded. The middle class lived better than kings a century earlier.

And yet this period in history is mostly ignored in the classroom. Those who do address it are keen to debunk the overall trends and instead focus on the plight of small sectors, generally seeking to debunk the idea that it was a period of growth.

The finest response to the "revisionist" view was written by a young Robert Higgs. Fresh out of graduate school and not yet exposed to the Austrian literature, he used the tools he had to shore up the reputation of the Gilded Age and explain that the growth was real and it happened due to free markets and sound money.

The result is a book that still has no match as a rigorous account of the economic history of the time.

Among many other insights, he explains the wonderful effects of population movements from the country to the city and how this led to new forms of communication and sharing of ideas among the commercial classes.

He explains how falling prices were not a disaster but rather a benefit to the population. He defends the hands-off approach of the presidency and the absence of bureaucratic management.

He shows that this period was the greatest triumph for mankind since the industrial revolution itself.

In this new edition, Higgs writes a new introduction to repudiates some of his methodological approach which he now finds to be excessively empirical and not drawing on the causal-realist tradition. That said, the book holds up as an economic history.

It is a fantastic thing to have this book available again to counter the propaganda that the Gilded Age was nothing but a time of Robber Barrons and rising class conflict. On the contrary, he argues, the masses have never before (or even after) benefited so much from an economic transformation.

The Great American Land Bubble: The Amazing Story of Land-Grabbing, Speculations, and Booms from Colonial Days to the Present Times

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:41:34 -0500

Those who lived through the huge speculative real estate bubble of the 1990s through 2008 might have imagined that it was unprecedented. Not so. Far from it!

This definitive history of land speculation provides a well-documented but hugely entertaining look at bubbles, bailouts, and land rackets from the Colonial Age through 1932, which is the date when this wonderful book by A.M. Sakolski (Professor of Finance, City College of New York) was first published. It is republished here because it presents a history that hardly anyone would otherwise know, and Sakolski’s treatment has never been surpassed.

The pattern has always been the same. The legislature assumes control over a parcel of land. They work with the executive to auction it off to political favorites. Banking interests get involved to float the loans. Expectations spin out of control, and the boom turns to bust. The banks get in trouble and they turn to the legislature and the executive, which then try to finagle some bailout deal that requires debt and floating more bonds that then have to find a market.

It’s been going on like this since Colonial times, and every important member of the political elite has been involved at all levels. Consider George Washington, who was a land surveyor and a land speculator. Salolski writes “Had he not become a great general and the Father of his Country, he probably would have been a foremost colonial financier and landlord.” And so it was with Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and most of the rest of them.

Land speculation was not always a racket. It was a huge business throughout American history and a legitimate enterprise. But because it always involved complex relations with legislatures and protected banking interests, hardly anyone had clean hands. This was true throughout American history, and it became decisive in many political turns of events.

Historians too often overlook the land question but not Sakolski. He finds land frenzies where we least expect them. He covers the Georgia “yazoo” frauds, the building of Washington as a real-estate boom town, the Louisiana grants, the Texas manias, railroad land jobbery, the Califoria gold frenzy, the pervasive marketing of “main street” and “broadway” streets, and the Florida scams and rackets.

To read this book, the reader has to prepare to let go of the romantic idea of pure homesteading of the Lockean model. At every stage, we see the intrusion of politics and the working out of debt-blown bubbles. For good and ill, America has always been a country with an unsual degree of tolerance for every manner of real-estate racketeering.

The Myth of a Guilty Nation

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:35:50 -0500

This was Albert Jay Nock's first great anti-war book, a cause he backed his entire life as an essential component of a libertarian outlook. The book came out in 1922 and has been in very low circulation ever since. In fact, until this printing, it has been very difficult to obtain in physical form.

The narrative has incredible staying power. The burden of the book is to prove American war propaganda to be false. The purpose of the war was not to liberate Europe and the world from German imperialism and threats. Today most everyone knows and understands this, but this was not known in 1922. If there was a conspiracy, it was by the allied powers to broadcast a public message that was completely contradicted by its own diplomatic cables.

Nock's book reminds us of what most everyone has forgotten, namely, that this was sold as a war for freedom and self-determination over imperial ambition. Along with that came some of the most rabid war propaganda ever fabricated until that point in time, all designed to make Germany into a devil nation. Nock's brave book took on that idea and demonstrated that there was fault enough to go around on all sides. All through the 1920s, a Nockian-style retelling of the facts behind the war led to a dramatic shift in public opinion against World War I.

As the introduction by Anders Mikkelsen points out, "Nock makes the reader aware of the great extent to which the allied politicians continually lied to blame Germany and justify the war, or at least told stories with no regard for the truth. No wonder Hitler found British propaganda so inspiring. In fact the story at the time made it sound like Germany was trying to overrun Europe the way Hitler temporarily did a few decades later.

"What makes this book worth reading is not whether this is the best explanation for WWI. It is worth seeing how small groups of state officials engaged in secret actions that led to a catastrophic war, and continually lied throughout the whole process to provide themselves ideological cover."

For lovers of Nock's work, this book is a fantastic addition. For those who have never encountered his writing, this book shows how he came to be such a powerful force in the world of literature and letters in the years between the wars.

Capital in Disequilibrium

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:45:53 -0500

A theoretical treatise is a rare event, a moment to celebrate. This is what Peter Lewin has provided in his Capital in Disequilibrium. Taking capital seriously is a distinguishing mark of the Austrian School. The Austrians see capital as decisive in the wealth-formation process, not just a big homogenous blob but an enormously complex structure that is heterogeneous in ways that really matter. This is how it must be in a world of relentless change where every economic decision is a speculation about an unknown future.

Professor Lewin provides an excellent summary of the contributions of Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and Lachmann, and goes on to apply their theory to modern macroeconomic understanding. The topics covered range from microeconomic issues of interest rates to macroeconomic issues of the business cycle. At every step, Lewin takes account of the real decisions of capital owners in a real world.

In the years since its first publication, the world in which we live has become even more dynamic. The pace of change has accelerated. The "digital age" works its magic every day in the form of new products, new organizations, new production techniques, new modes of communication, and who knows what else. This increased dynamism has enhanced the relevance of the capital-based framework developed in this book.

It is not possible to understand economic processes in a developed economy without taking full account of capital, its structure, and its role. Lewin is to be congratulated for providing the first contemporary account and thus adding to the Austrian corpus of economic understanding.

Study Guide to the Theory of Money and Credit

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:55:11 -0500

Consider the timing of this wonderful study guide to the best book ever written on money and credit. The book itself was written 100 years ago. The world economy is in the throes of another financial and debt crisis. Keynesianism has completely failed. Fiat money has too. Above it all stands Mises's masterwork, laying out the whole correct theory of money: it should be sound, solid, and market controlled.

Here is the guide to the book that still has a voice after 100 years, and that voice is stronger than ever. Mises wrote it as a warning against central banking, predicting that this institution would produce more instability than ever before — plus inflation, debt, and deep danger to the pillars of prosperity.

He was right in every case.

In this new guide, Robert Murphy takes the reader through Mises's book one chapter at a time. He provides summaries, points for discussion, and study questions, and he assesses the book in light of modern history.

Most of all, Mises's book teaches the theory of money, and with Professor Murphy's guide, you will understand where money comes from, what it does, how it is managed in a market, and what government does to destroy it. Most people agree that this was not only a great book but perhaps the greatest monetary treatise ever written.

The original book can, however, be intimidating and even scary. This guide opens it up as never before!

ISBN: 9781610162357
6 x 9 - Spiral Bound - 262 pages - published date 8/4/2011

Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:18:32 -0500

This professionally prepared ebook is an electronic edition of the book that is designed for reading on digital readers like iPad, Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, and other products including iPhone and Android smart phones. The text reflows depending on your font preferences and it contains links from navigation.

Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse is a comprehensive, if informal and radical, study of the major trends in leftist thought from the era of the French Revolution. This title is the original edition.
Kuehnelt seeks to redefine the political spectrum. His background as an Austrian nobleman gives him a perspective on politics that is very different and unique compared with the vast majority of Americans. Kuehnelt also openly writes from a Roman Catholic viewpoint and pro-Christian viewpoint. He defines as "leftist" as any movement that emphasizes "identitarianism" (i.e. sameness) and either the total rule of the state or "the will of the people" over the populace's affairs. The political writings of Aristotle identify three poor forms of government: democracy, oligarchy and tyranny; and three good forms: constitutional republic, aristocracy and monarchy. Democracies tend to degenerate into tyranny as witness by the chaotic Weimar republic sowing the seeds for the Nazi takeover because it lacked any foundations in traditional German politics, which was dominated by the nobility. What is especially odd about Kuehnelt's study is he classifies Nazism and Fascism as "leftist" movements. The Nazis were anti-aristocratic and anti-tradition, and tried to create a revolutionary state. Since left wing movements tend to want to standardize everything and make everything the same, Nazism had a leftist tendency when it emphasized the "Aryan race" as the ideal for all humanity. Hitler was a product of the mass society of the early 1900s. Nazism is similar to the more familiar liberal, internationalist Leftism, which denies racial and gender differences and seeks to make the world a giant unisex, brown conglomerate. In both perspectives, one race (the Aryan or the hybrid) is given the key to the future as the harbinger of a worldly, conflict free paradise. Marxism and socialism during the 19th and 20th centuries was of course profoundly leftist. They tried (and were successful in Russia) to overthrow all of the "bourgeoisie" establishments in society and set up a totally ahistorical new form of government that supposedly would accommodate the interests of the majority of humanity, the proletariat, by eradicating traditional religion and having a small party of government bureaucrats dictate economic policy. This of course resulted in human catastrophe, as the deportations, famines and sheer brutality of life in Communist Russia and China have shown. Hatred of the Jews is generally attributed to the right, but Kuehnelt provides examples of Marx's distaste for the Jewish culture he grew up in. Democratic tyranny (this is not an oxymoron) in the name of "the people" has a heritage reaching back to the Enlightenment, the ideals of Rousseau and the violence of the French Revolution. Then of course don't forget the liberalization-at-gunpoint programs of Peter the Great, Kemal Ataturk and the US Civil Rights movement. America started off with a constitutional republic and has since fallen prey to democratic tendencies. The Founding Fathers were not egalitarians by any sense of the word (especially not Jefferson, who is usually touted as having the most egalitarian views), but were rather aristocrats who wanted to protect their own interests in the US and opposed royal authority over them. Especially harmful in the international scene were the utopian pretensions of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The most prominent example of a true rightist government in the 20th century was Francisco Franco's who defeated communists, socialists and assorted enemies of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War. Kuehnelt's book is also greatly helpful because he defines how true rightists in different countries may in fact be very different from each other because of a variety of cultural and national circumstances. He does not want conservative groups solely made up of the "haters of the haters," like the neo-Nazis who opposed democracy and liberalism today. He decries the harmful rightist tendency, especially prominent in America, towards anti-intellectualism. The term "liberal" can also be redefined to its more original usage. "Liberty" meant personal freedom, restriction from government control. "Liberty" is mutually exclusive with "Equality" whenever people are forced intentionally by an external institution to be the Equal (in education, occupation, physical appearance, financial income, etc) because enforced equality (a type of 'secular monasticism' as Kuehnelt describes it) goes against human nature. It is the product of a more or less conscious rejection of Christian theology because it presupposes man's perfectibility in this life.

Roger Williams’s Unintentional Contribution to the Creation of American Capitalism

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:05:45 -0500

Resist Not Evil

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:30:53 -0500

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive, sweeping, compelling, and unsettling case ever penned against what is laughingly called the criminal-justice system. It is a classic, devastating at its core, that is made newly available to speak to us in our times in which the state is completely out of control.

Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. But that case actually played a minor role in his life. He was an attorney by training who, from experience, learned that the entire state apparatus of courts, trials, and prisons was the worst single feature of the state. He saw the entire machinery as a gigantic fraud, a purveyor of injustice, a producer of criminality itself.

How so? Because, in the same way that the state cannot plan the economy, "the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice.” He proves the point. It taxes people more rather than brings about compensation. It kills rather than rights wrongs. It ruins lives instead of righting them. It cares nothing about victims and instead makes more of them. Darrow even argues that the state attempts to create more criminals rather than stopping crime.

For this reason, and after seeing these truths play themselves out in his work, he became a radical, and Resist Not Evil is his manifesto. What strikes you as you read is that certain negative points about "criminal justice" that you have noticed are not just periodic accidents. They aren’t mistakes. They aren’t exceptions. Darrow explains that the injustice of the system is intrinsic to the system itself. Far from being the proper agency to adjudicate and administer justice, the state is actually the worst agency for this purpose.

in his view, every real crime is made far worse when the state gets involved - presuming powers to bring results that it cannot possibly achieve. Moreover, the state has every interest in expanding criminality into ever more spheres of life - making peaceful behavior illegal and doing nothing about actual crime. This is not incompetence or bad policy at work. Darrow says that this is intrinsic to the game of state-administered justice itself.

The "nightwatchmen state" of the old liberal legend is actually the core of the problem.

In many ways, his conclusions are the same ones that Murray Rothbard came to so many decades later. The remarkable fact is that Darrow’s book was published in 1902 when the state was much smaller and had not built its current-day empire of tax-funded police, prisons, and courts.

Fair warning: this book is extremely unsettling. It will shake you fundamentally. You will never look at judges, police, courts, and jails the same way. It could change your whole outlook on politics - permanently.

Doug French writes the introduction.

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:42:16 -0500

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes from Mises Media on Vimeo.

We are surrounded by miracles created in the private sector, particularly in the digital universe, and yet we don't appreciate them enough. Meanwhile, the public sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter.

Jeffrey Tucker, in this follow-up to his Bourbon for Breakfast, draws detailed attention to both. He points out that the products of digital capitalism are amazing, astounding, beyond belief—more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box in hand, we can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet and pay nothing more than my usual service fee. This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other person on the globe. The borders, the limits, the barriers—they are all being blasted away.

The pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that’s only for now, and who knows what next year will bring.

Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of “miracle fatigue”—too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all.

And why? It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, Tucker argues, which does not and will not change so long as we live in a world of scarcity. We adjust to amazing things and don’t think much about their source or the system that produces them.

The Jetsons’ world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very font of the good life. But there is one major difference, and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have were it not for the government’s promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life to its smallest detail.

The government is still Flintstones, an anachronism that operates as this massive drag on our lives. With its money manipulations, regulations, taxation, wars (on people, products, and services), prisons, and injustices, we similarly look the other way. We try to find the workaround and keep living like the Jetsons. Often times things don’t go right and the reason is the anachronism that rules us. And yet, unless we understand cause and effect in the way that the old liberal tradition explained it, we can miss the source.

Tucker goes to great length to explain that which we take for granted, that glorious global network of cooperation and exchange we call the market economy and its capacity to meet our every material need. At the same time, he draws attention to way that the government is chipping away at economic opportunity and making our lives a bit more miserable every day. The answer to the problem of private miracles and public crimes is to keep the former and jettison the later -- all in the service of that elusive dream of universal peace and prosperity.

This book will inspire love for free markets - and loathing of government.

Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 13:30:14 -0500

Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?: Essays in Political Economy

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:04:40 -0500

Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty? by Professor Leland B. Yeager

Professor Leland B. Yeager (University of Virginia and Auburn University) is one of the giants of the generation of economists after Ludwig von Mises. He was Mises's student and translator - and has made a lifetime of contributions to policy, theory, method, ethics, and aesthetics from the point of view of a champion of freedom and a deep respect for the Austrian tradition.

This vast but affordable collection is a tribute to the range of his brilliance and erudition, and a reminder that his contributions are enormous. Many of the essays found herein are nearly lost or unavailable. Yeager selected them with an eye toward the essays that most pertain to the Austrian tradition and the moral imperative of the free society.

The title essay is one of the more controversial articles to ever appear in economic literature. It began as a response to the criticism that if Misesian economics were so great, it would be the market leader within the profession. Yeager responds with a general theory of market dominance and its relationship to issues of truth and beauty. He argues that we cannot use the market as the final test to determine aesthetics or the value of truth claims. These must come from outside market analytics.

The essay offers a profound clarification of the role of economics and markets. And it is an archetype of the type of thinking that Yeager has published through his long career. He is an iconoclast, a truly independent thinker with a bold way of approaching core issues. Even where one disagrees, he helps advance careful thinking and rigorous analysis.

The essays are unfailingly interesting, and note that one of them is actually in the language called Interlingua (Yeager briefly served as president of the Interlingua Society). It is probably the first and only English-language book on economics to include such an interesting item.

His many students through the years have hoped for a volume with his most interesting, provocative, and thrilling essays - and it is here at last. This book will more firmly entrench his reputation as a giant within the Austrian oeuvre.

Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?: Essays in Political Economy

538 pages
Contents:

Introduction
PART I: ECONOMICS

Should Austrians Scorn General Equilibrium Theory?
Why Subjectivism?
Henry George and Austrian Economics
The Debate about the Efficiency of a Socialist Economy
The Debate over Calculation and Knowledge
Austrian Economics, Neoclassicism, and the Market Test
Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?
Macroeconomics and Coordination
The Keynesian Heritage in Economics
Hutt and Keynes
The Image of the Gold Standard
Land, Money, and Capital Formation
Tacit Preachments are the Worst Kind
Tautologies in Economics and the Natural Sciences

PART II: POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY

Free Will and Ethics
Elementos del Economia Politic
Is There a Bias Toward Overregulation?
Economics and Principles
American Democracy Diagnosed
Civic Religion Reasserted
A Libertarian Case for Monarchy
Uchronia, or Alternative History
Hayek on the Psychology of Socialism and Freedom
Kirzner on the Morality of Capitalist Profit
Mises and His Critics on Ethics, Rights, and Law
The Moral Element in Mises’s Human Action
Can a Liberal Be an Egalitarian?
Rights, Contract, and Utility in Policy Espousal

Index

Review of The Invention of Enterprise

Tue, 24 May 2011 16:21:52 -0500

Free Banking and the Structure of Production: A Contrast of Competing Banking Systems

Mon, 23 May 2011 22:57:45 -0500

The Causes of Price Inflation & Deflation: Fundamental Economic Principles the Deflationists Have Ignored

Sun, 08 May 2011 10:26:24 -0500

Contra Copyright, Again

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:39:07 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-12 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Review of Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:51:11 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-11

Free Markets, Property Rights and Climate Change: How to Privatize Climate Policy

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:18:56 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-10 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

The Economic Nobel Prize

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:34:10 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-9 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Truth in Philosophy

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:33:35 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-8 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Well-Being and Objectivity

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:32:18 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-7 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Response to Block on Abortion, Round Three

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:36:55 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 5, No. 1

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 05:01:28 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 11

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:57:40 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 12

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:53:22 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 7

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:49:16 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 3, No. 2

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:44:21 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 12

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:39:15 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-6 Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext

Unity and Integration in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:02:05 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-5 Mac OS X 10.6.6 Quartz PDFContext

Response to Wisniewski on Abortion, Round Two

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:38:45 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-3 Mac OS X 10.6.6 Quartz PDFContext

Review of Kosanke’s Instead of Politics

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:37:10 -0500
Stephan Kinsella lp-3-3 Mac OS X 10.6.6 Quartz PDFContext

Persuasion, Vol. 1, No. 3

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:45:12 -0500

Persuasion, Vol.1, No. 5

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:35:32 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 3, No. 12

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:31:20 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 10

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:24:21 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 10

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:18:47 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 9

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:14:51 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 3, No. 9

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:10:12 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 9

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:03:43 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 1, No. 2

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:55:00 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 8

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:50:45 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 3, No. 7

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:43:53 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 7

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:36:57 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 6

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:32:49 -0500

Persuasion, Vol. 3, No. 6

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:26:46 -0500

Economic Controversies

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:07:58 -0500

After Murray Rothbard finished his theoretical magnum opus - Man, Economy, and State - he turned his attention away from pure positive theory toward dealing with the opposition to Austrian theory. The result was a long series of fantastic scholarly articles taking on every error of the day, and our day too.

Together they form a volume 2 of his great work. This is Economic Controversies. He covers the same range of topics in Man, Economy, and State. Most all have been published, but they are strewn out among journals that are hard to access or books that are out of print. Some have never been published.

Rothbard gives his all in these critiques of the opponents of Austrian theory and policy, slicing through fallacies with breathtaking virtuosity. It’s a model of intellectual combat, page after page of razor-sharp thinking and crystal-clear prose.

To have this all in one place, beautifully organized, creates a treasure in the history of economic ideas.

Gene Epstein of Barron's writes the outstanding introduction. The price is thrillingly affordable for this gigantic hardback.

Introduction by Gene Epstein

Section One: Method

The Mantle of Science

What is the Proper Way to Study Man?

Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences

Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics

Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy

In Defense of “Extreme Apriorism”

Praxeology: Reply to Mr. Schuller

The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics

Section Two: The Austrian School

New Light on the Prehistory of the Austrian School

The Present State of Austrian Economics

Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for Our Age

Value Implications of Economic Theory

The Myth of Efficiency

Breaking Out of the Walrasian Box: Schumpeter and Hansen

Professor Rolph on the Discounted Marginal Productivity Theory

Professor Kirzner on Entrepreneurship

Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics

Section Three: Property and the Public Sector

The Politics of Political Economists

Justice and Property Rights

Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution

The Fallacy of the “Public Sector”

Statistics: Achilles’s Heel of Government

How and How Not to Desocialize

Section Four: Taxation

The Myth of Neutral Taxation

The Myth of Tax “Reform”

The Consumption Tax: A Critique

The Case Against the Flat Tax

The Uneasy Case for Degressive Taxation: A Critique of Blum and Kalven

The Single Tax: Economic and Moral Implications

The Value-Added Tax is Not the Answer

A Reply to Georgist Criticisms

Section Five: Trade and Freedom

Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor

Restrictionist Pricing of Labor

Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times?

Capitalism versus Statism

A Future of Peace and Capitalism

Section Six: Money, Banking, and Calculation

The Austrian Theory of Money

Money, the State, and Modern Mercantilism

Austrian Definitions of the Supply of Money

Gold vs. Fluctuating Fiat Exchange Rates

The Case For a Genuine Gold Dollar

Inflation and the Business Cycle: The Collapse of the Keynesian Paradigm

Lange, Mises and Praxeology: The Retreat from Marxism

Ludwig von Mises and Economic Calculation Under Socialism

The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited

The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland

Aurophobia: Or, Free Banking on What Standard?

Section Seven: Criticism

Milton Friedman Unraveled

Paul Samuelson’s Economics, Ninth Edition

Heilbroner’s Economic Means and Social Ends

Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent

Bibliography
Index

Investment Chains Through History

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:16:43 -0500

The Bastiat Collection

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:39:34 -0500

The world has always needed this: a gigantic collection of Bastiat's greatest work in a single, super-handy pocket edition, at a ridiculously affordable price. All of the best essays by this giant of liberty are here, 1000 plus pages of it, but in a compact package that it is still easy to read. In fact, it is a joy to hold and even more to read because the text just jumps off the page.

Putting this together was a challenge but one we accepted because many people said that our two-volume hardback, though beautiful, was too costly and cumbersome. For some collectors, this was great, but what about students and people who read on the subway, or on lunch break, or just want to throw the book into an overnight bag for a quick trip somewhere?

We can't be more pleased at the result. This is the Bastiat Collection that the world has needed.

Claude Frédéric Bastiat was an economist and publicist of breathtaking intellectual energy and massive historical influence. He was born in Bayonne, France on June 29th, 1801. After the middle-class Revolution of 1830, Bastiat became politically active and was elected Justice of the Peace in 1831 and to the Council General (county-level assembly) in 1832. He was elected to the national legislative assembly after the French Revolution of 1848.

Bastiat was inspired by and routinely corresponded with Richard Cobden and the English Anti-Corn Law League and worked with free-trade associations in France. Bastiat wrote sporadically starting in the 1830s, but in 1844 he launched his amazing publishing career when an article on the effects of protectionism on the French and English people was published in the Journal des Economistes which was held to critical acclaim.

The bulk of his remarkable writing career that so inspired the early generation of English translators—and so many more—is contained in this collection.

If we were to take the greatest economists from all ages and judge them on the basis of their theoretical rigor, their influence on economic education, and their impact in support of the free-market economy, then Frédéric Bastiat would be at the top of the list.

As Murray N. Rothbard noted: "Bastiat was indeed a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control. He was a truly scintillating advocate of an untrammeled free market."

This book bring together his greatest works and represents the early generation of English translations. These translators were like Bastiat himself, people from the private sector who had a love of knowledge and truth and who altered their careers to vigorously pursue intellectual ventures, scholarly publishing, and advocacy of free trade.

Thus does this collection, totaling 1,000 pages plus extensive indexes, represent some of the best economics ever written. He was the first, and one of the very few, to be able to convincingly communicate the basic propositions of economics.

The vast majority of people who have learned anything about economics have relied on Bastiat or publications that were influenced by his work. This collection—possibly more than anything ever written about economics—is the antidote for economic illiteracy regarding such things as the inadvisability of tariffs and price controls, and everyone from the novice to the Ph.D. economist will benefit from reading it.

The collection consists of three sections, the first of which contains his best-known essays. In That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, Bastiat equips the reader to become an economist in the first paragraph and then presents the story of the broken window where a hoodlum is thought to create jobs and prosperity by breaking windows. Bastiat solves the quandary of prosperity via destruction by noting that while the apparent prosperity is seen, what is unseen is that which would have been produced had the windows not been broken.

Professor Jörg Guido Hülsmann credits Bastiat for discovering the counterfactual method, which allowed Bastiat to show that destruction (and a variety of government policies) is actually the path to poverty, not prosperity. This lesson is then applied to a variety of more complex cases, after which the reader will never be able to deny that scarcity exists and will always—hopefully—remember that every policy has an opportunity cost. If nothing else, they will not believe—as is often claimed—that earthquakes, hurricanes, and wars lead to prosperity.

The remaining essays cover the important institutions of society—law, government, money, and capital—where Bastiat explains the nature of these institutions and disabuses the reader of all the common misconceptions regarding them.

The second section is Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms, a collection of 35 articles on the errors of protectionism broadly conceived. Here Bastiat shows his mastery of the methods of argumentation— using basic logic and taking arguments to their logical extreme—to demonstrate and ridicule them as obvious fallacies. In his Negative Railroad Bastiat argues that if an artificial break in a railroad causes prosperity by creating jobs for boatmen, porters, and hotel owners, then there should be not one break, but many, and indeed the railroad should be just a series of breaks—a negative railroad.

In his article An Immense Discovery! he asks, would it not be easier and faster simply to lower the tariff between points A and B rather than building a new railroad to transport products at a lower cost? His Petition of the Candlemakers argues in jest that a law should be passed to require that all doors and windows be closed and covered during the day to prevent the sun from unfairly competing with the makers of candles and that if such a law were passed it would create high-paying jobs in candle and candlestick making, oil lamps, whale oil, etc. and that practically everyone would profit as a result.

The third section is Bastiat’s Economic Harmonies which was hastily written before his death in 1850 and is considered incomplete. Here he demonstrates that the interests of everyone in society are in harmony to the extent that property rights are respected. Because there are no inherent conflicts in the market, government intervention is unnecessary. Here we find a powerful but sadly neglected defense of the main thesis of old-style liberalism: that society and economy are capable of self-management. Unless this insight is understood and absorbed, a person can never really come to grips with the fundamental meaning of liberty.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Mark Thornton

I. That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen

1. The Broken Window

2. The Disbanding of Troops

3. Taxes

4. Theaters and Fine Arts

5. Public Works

6. The Intermediaries

7. Protectionism

8. Machinery

9. Credit

10. Algeria

11. Frugality and Luxury

12. He Who Has a Right to Work Has a Right to Profit

II. The Law

III. Government .

IV. What Is Money?

V. Capital and Interest

1. Introduction

2. Ought Capital to Produce Interest?

3. What Is Capital?

4. The Sack of Corn

5. The House

6. The Plane

7. What Regulates Interest?

VI. Economic Sophisms—First Series

Introduction

1. Abundance—Scarcity

2. Obstacle—Cause

3. Effort—Result

4. To Equalize the Conditions of Production

5. Our Products Are Burdened with Taxes

6. Balance of Trade

7. Petition of the Manufacturers of Candles

8. Differential Duties—Tariffs

9. Immense Discovery

10. Reciprocity

11. Nominal Prices

12. Does Protection Raise Wages?

13. Theory—Practice

14. Conflict of Principles

15. Reciprocity Again

16. Obstruction—The Plea of the Protectionist

17. A Negative Railway

18. There Are No Absolute Principles

19. National Independence

20. Human Labor—National Labor

21. Raw Materials

22. Metaphors

23. Conclusion

VII. Economic Sophisms—Second Series

1. Natural History of Spoliation

2. Two Systems of Morals

3. The Two Hatchets

4. Lower Council of Labor

5. Dearness—Cheapness

6. To Artisans and Workmen

7. A Chinese Story

8. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

9. The Premium Theft—Robbery by Subsidy

10. The Tax Gatherer

11. Protection; or, The Three City Aldermen

12. Something Else

13. The Little Arsenal of the Free-Trader

14. The Right Hand and the Left

15. Domination by Labor

VIII. Harmonies of Political Economy (Book One)

To the Youth of France

1. Natural and Artificial Organization

2. Wants, Efforts, Satisfactions

3. Wants of Man

4. Exchange

5. Of Value

6. Wealth

7. Capital

8. Property—Community

9. Landed Property

10. Competition

Concluding Observations

IX. Harmonies of Political Economy (Book Two)

11. Producer—Consumer

12. The Two Aphorisms

13. Rent

14. Wages

15. Saving

16. Population

17. Private and Public Services

18. Disturbing Causes

19. War

20. Responsibility

21. Solidarity

22. Social Motive Force

23. Existence of Evil

24. Perfectibility

25. Relationship of Political Economy and Religion

Index

The Turgot Collection: Writings, Speeches, and Letters of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:05:22 -0500

This outstanding book was ten years in the making, but it is finally here and the result is startling. It is a pocket edition, super economical, 525 pages of Turgot – the bulk of his life’s work, all beautifully organized.

He might have been the key influence on Jefferson but, in any case, he certainly was the great French liberal of the 18th century, not only a proto-Austrian but also a fantastic defender of human liberty in every respect.

Of course the book includes his famed and pioneering "Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth." But this volume covers economics, history, social theory, philosophy, and even religion. It also includes his correspondence with Voltaire, Hume, Condorcet, and others.

You will find yourself wrapped up in his worldview and thinking like a liberal French aristocrat of the time. Murray Rothbard's brilliant essay on Turgot is the preface. David Gordon wrote the lucid and helpful introductions to each section. Here you find not only his economics but his theory of history and life itself.

Turgot might be the greatest, least known of the enlightenment liberals. This volume should certainly contribute to making a revival possible.

As Murray Rothbard writes:

"Not only was Turgot a busy administrator, but his intellectual interests were wide-ranging, and most of his spare time was spent reading and writing, not in economics, but in history, literature, philology, and the natural sciences. His contributions to economics were brief, scattered, and hasty. His most famous work, “Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth” (1766), comprised only fifty-three pages. This brevity only highlights the great contributions to economics made by this remarkable man. In the history of thought, the style is often the man, and Turgot’s clarity and lucidity of style mirrors the virtues of his thought, and contrasts refreshingly to the prolix and turgid prose of the physiocrat school.

The Turgot Collection from Mises Media on Vimeo.

Introduction by Murray N. Rothbard

PART I: ECONOMICS

1. Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth
2. Letter to l’Abbé de Cicé, since then Bishop of Auxerre, on the Replacing of Money by Paper. Also Known as the “Letter on Paper-Money”
3. Remarks on the Notes to the Translation of Josiah Child
4. Fairs and Markets
5. In Praise of Gournay
6. Observations on a Paper by Saint-Péravey
7. Observations on the Paper by Graslin
8. Value and Money
9. Plan for a Paper on Taxation
10. Extracts from “Paper on Lending at Interest”
11. Extracts from “Letters on the Grain Trade”
12. Letter to l’Abbé Terray on the “Marque des Fers"
13. Six Projects of Edicts Which Suppresses the Corvée and Decrees the Construction of Highways for a Money Price Decreeing the Suppression of Craft-Guilds Which Repeals Certain Rules Concerning Grain Products Enacting the Suppression of the Exchange of Poissy Enacting a Change and Modification of Taxes on Suet Enacting the Suppression of Offices Connected with the Ports, Quays, Stalls and Markets of Paris

PART II: PHILOSOPHY
14. A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind
15. On Universal History

PART III: SOCIAL QUESTIONS
16. On Some Social Questions, Including the Education of the Young
17. Local Government and National Education
18. Religious Liberty “Le conciliateur”
19. Religious Equality 20. Endowments

PART IV: CORRESPONDENCE
To Voltaire
To Condorcet
To David Hume
To Mlle. de Lespinasse
To Abbé Morellet
To Dr. Josiah Tucker
To Dr. Richard Price
To du Pont
Appendix: Miscellaneous Extracts Sources Index

The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination, and Relation to Economic Phenomena

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:20:53 -0600
Personal copy of Frank Knight, with liner notes and markings.

Lessons for the Young Economist

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:57:02 -0600

This is the textbook Lessons for the Young Economist. View the Teachers Manual to Lessons for the Young Economist here

We are beyond mere excitement about Lessons for the Young Economist. It is easily the best introduction to economics for the young reader—because it covers both pure economic theory and also how markets work (the domain of most introductory books).

Robert Murphy has the right frame of mind and mastery of the subject matter to provide the best possible pedagogy. The logic is super clear. The organization is impeccable. It achieves a great balance between “plain old” economics and that aspect of economic thought that is considered particularly Austrian. Therefore, it prepares the student for both conventional economic studies in the future and provides the logical rigor and policy clarity that only the Austrian School perspective can offer.

Most of the attempts at such texts falter because they are either too dry and technical for the young reader or they are littered with attempts to keep the student entertained with references to pop culture or cheesy passages that attempt to “speak the child’s language” but only end up sounding patronizing.

Dr. Murphy’s text has none of this. The prose has relentless fire without needless fireworks. What drives it forward is intellectual passion born of his love of the topic. What’s also nice is that he is nowhere self-consciously trying to sound like someone he is not. It is his real voice, explaining everything point by point. For this reason, the text is warm and engaging.

Here is the product of vast experience and daily writing. This permits the voicing of the book to achieve a remarkable integration page to page, chapter to chapter. Though he is drawing from the whole history of the development of economics, the text ends up being strikingly original. His approach is not based on anything but his own sense of how to teach this subject.

This book will not be boring or useless even for people who think they already know the subject. Every page or two, there are fresh insights. For example, on the problems with barter, he shows that in the real world, most goods and services would not have come into existence at all (so that there would be no trading of tractors for cobbler services because there would be no tractors or repairable shoes). In another place, he points out that one of the advantage

Persuasion, Vol. 2., No. 6

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Persuasion Vol.2, No. 5

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:20:06 -0600

Persuasion, Vol. 5, No. 4

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:53:39 -0600
Persuasion, 1968

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 4

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:04:42 -0600

Persuasion, Vol. 5, No. 3

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:14:04 -0600

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 3

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:02:58 -0600

Persuasion, Vol. 5, No. 2

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 13:50:52 -0600

Mises Institute New Literature

Principles of Ethics: Anthology

Principles of Ethics: Anthology

A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt

Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government

The Wizards of Ozymandias

War Collectivism

Review of Austrian Economics, Full Collection

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 10

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 9

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 8

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 7

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 6

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 5

The Review of Austrian Economics

The Review of Austrian Economics

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 4

The Review of Austrian EconomicsVolume 4

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 3

Contents

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 2

Contents

Review of Austrian Economics, Volume 1

Contents

Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought (Complete, 1965-1968)

Lessons for the Young Economist Teacher's Manual

TEST DOCUMENT - IGNORE

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School

Economics in One Lesson

The Pure Time-Preference Theory of Interest

Mises on Money

Liberalismo e Anarcocapitalismo: La Scuola Austriaca di Economia

The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories

Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt

Liberty Magazine 22.6

Liberty Magazine 24.11

Liberty Magazine 24.10

Liberty Magazine 24.9

Liberty Magazine 24.8

Liberty Magazine 24.7

Liberty Magazine 24.6

Liberty Magazine 24.5

Liberty Magazine 24.4

Liberty Magazine 1.1

Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War

Effects of the War on the Money, Banking, Credit System of the United States

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume IV

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume III

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume II

Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume I

The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865-1914

The Great American Land Bubble: The Amazing Story of Land-Grabbing, Speculations, and Booms from Colonial Days to the Present Times

The Myth of a Guilty Nation

Capital in Disequilibrium

Study Guide to the Theory of Money and Credit

Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse

Roger Williams’s Unintentional Contribution to the Creation of American Capitalism

Resist Not Evil

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes

Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia

Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?: Essays in Political Economy

Review of The Invention of Enterprise

Free Banking and the Structure of Production: A Contrast of Competing Banking Systems

The Causes of Price Inflation & Deflation: Fundamental Economic Principles the Deflationists Have Ignored

Contra Copyright, Again

Review of Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right

Free Markets, Property Rights and Climate Change: How to Privatize Climate Policy

The Economic Nobel Prize

Truth in Philosophy

Well-Being and Objectivity

Response to Block on Abortion, Round Three

Persuasion, Vol. 5, No. 1

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 11

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 12

Persuasion, Vol. 4, No. 7

Persuasion, Vol. 3, No. 2

Persuasion, Vol. 2, No. 12

Unity and Integration in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

Response to Wisniewski on Abortion, Round Two

Review of Kosanke’s Instead of Politics

^The Review of Austrian Economics

^The Review of Austrian Economics

The Review of Austrian Economics
Volume 4