Articles of Interest

Chapter 19 from The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Denson, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, Publishers, 1999, pp. 433–53.

Peter Seewald has published an extensive biography of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, which will be of special interest to all supporters of the Austrian school and lovers of liberty who, whether believers or not, persistently condemn the “fatal conceit” of statism.

In every country that has moved toward socialism, the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals.

"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.

There is a ceaseless downpour of new laws. Every day some of us, somewhere, are being encumbered or shackled by still more restrictions. There are just too many laws. But how do we tell how many laws are too many, and which ones are pernicious?