[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 1: “J.B. Say: the French tradition in Smithian clothing.”] If Adam Smith purged economic thought of the very existence of the entrepreneur, J.B. Say, to his everlasting credit, brought him back. Not quite as far back to be sure as
[This article is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty , volume 1, chapter 37, “The Restoration Crisis in New England.” An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Floy Lilley, is available for download .] One of the most far-reaching actions of the first years of the Restoration was a series of Navigation Acts, by which England imposed
[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995).] Typically, determinist schema leave convenient implicit escape hatches for their creators and advocates, who are somehow able to rise above the iron determinism that afflicts the rest of us. Hegel was no different, except
[From Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market ] Up to this point we have discussed the case in which the owners of land and labor, i.e., of the original factors, restrict their possible consumption and invest their factors in a production process, which, after a certain time, produces a consumers’ good to be sold to consumers for money.
[From Reflections on America, 1984: An Orwell Symposium . Ed. Robert Mulvihill. Athens and London, University of Georgia Press, 1986.] In a recent and well-known article, Norman Podhoretz has attempted to conscript George Orwell into the ranks of neoconservative enthusiasts for the newly revitalized cold war with the Soviet Union. If Orwell were
[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . ] Communist Zealots: the Anabaptists Sometimes Martin Luther must have felt that he had loosed the whirlwind, even opened the gates of Hell. Shortly after Luther launched the Reformation, various Anabaptist
[This article is excerpted from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith .] The views of the great philosopher Aristotle are particularly important because the entire structure of his thought had an enormous and even dominant influence on the economic and social thought of the high and late Middle Ages, which considered itself Aristotelian. Although
[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith .] By the beginning of the 17th century, royal absolutism had emerged victorious all over Europe. But a king (or, in the case of the Italian city-states, some lesser prince or ruler) cannot rule all by himself.
[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith .] Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83) was no scholar or theorist, but he knew with firm conviction what ideas he liked, and these were the mercantilist notions that had filled the air in France and the rest of Europe
[This unsigned editorial, written by Murray N. Rothbard, appeared in the April 15, 1969, issue of The Libertarian (soon to become The Libertarian Forum ).] April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself. The first great lesson to learn about taxation is
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
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