Articles of Interest

The rereading of Atlas was ... important to the cult because the wooden, posturing, and one-dimensional heroes and heroines were explicitly supposed to serve as role models for every Randian.

J.B. Say deserves to be remembered, especially by Austrian economists, as a pivotal figure in the history of economic thought. Yet, one finds him discussed very briefly, if at all.

The challenge facing economic science is to counter the reactionary counterrevolution by states and governments that smother voluntary cooperation and free human interaction based on liberty. The chains must be thrown off in favor of the libertarian ideal of an anarchocapitalist system. 

Roosevelt stands for the national government as we know it today, a vast, unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus that recognizes no limits whatsoever to its power, either at home or abroad.

Were the Founding Fathers somehow to return, they would find it impossible to recognize our political system. War has warped our constitutional order, the course of our national development, and the very mentality of our people.

The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Americans have added freedom and democracy. Yet the more that may be added to it the more it is the same language still. A language of power.

Rothbard illustrates that both in theory and in practice, socialism is a system unsurpassed in brutality, despotism, mass murder and exploitation. Socialism deserves no solemn respect or moral salute.

While upholding the radical ideal, Rothbard happily cooperated with anyone who wanted to limit government power, no matter how gradually. The perfect was never the enemy of the good in his mind; the good was always an improvement. He combined idealism with realism, scholarship with accessibility, and boundless curiosity with commitment to truth.

The following reading is a selection from Human Action, Chapter XV, “The Market,” by Ludwig von Mises.

In the following reading from Socialism, Mises explains how money prices are critical for an economy to be an economy, i.e., a system in which production and consumption are economized. Mises concludes, “Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.”