"The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other."
In this article from 1950, Murray Rothbard suggests some of the less bad ways of financing military operations. Hint: monetary inflation and taxing savings and investment are among the worst.
Judgments of value do not measure: they arrange, they grade. If he relies only on subjective valuation, even isolated man cannot arrive at an economic decision based on more or less exact computations in cases where the solution is not immediately evident. To aid his calculations he must assume substitution relations between commodities. That's where exchange value and prices come in.
The Austrian-school approach, with its realist, real-world approach, is actually more inclined toward empiricism than the neo-classical economists who tend toward very abstract theories and models.
An essential aspect of the Mengerian-Misesian tradition — the emphasis that it puts on the entrepreneurial character of all human action, that is, its inherent entanglement with the problems of scarcity and uncertainty.
Menger’s insights about the origin of social structures inspired later contributions in three main areas: spontaneous order, money, and law.
"The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
Inflation can always give only a temporary fillip to the economy, and will leave us with a legacy of postponed adjustments and new maladjustments which make our problem more difficult.
Whoever wishes to do so, freely and voluntarily. Conscription of witnesses is no more justified than conscription into the armed forces or into any other service or occupation.
Ralph Raico pays homage to Ludwig von Mises and his place in the social sciences.
