Austrian Economics Overview

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This completes the study of money and of the effects of changes in monetary relations on the economic system. Like all commodities, money has its own supply and demand and price: purchasing power. Everyone deals in money.

Walter Block met Rothbard in 1966. Here, Block tells a joke making the point that antitrust law is dead from the neck up. There is nothing wrong with a monopoly price. Whatever price the free market establishes will be the best price.

The pricing, supplies, and incomes of particular factor prices - labor and land -  and the effects of a changing economy upon them are discussed as Rothbard viewed them. The theory of rent is a highlight of this chapter. The Mengarian causal-realist tradition is integrated here.

The uniqueness of the Austrian approach to taxation is to first cover Public Policy, then Antimarket Ethics and finally Taxation. It is a praxeological development approach. Robbery and counterfeiting are the revenues to the state. You can't look at taxation alone, you must look at expenditures, too.

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments. Common criticisms of the free market are refuted praxeologically in this chapter. Absolute equality is an impossible goal.

Power & Market - this second section of Rothbard's book - shows the state was to be protector of the people and property, but the government is contradictory to that task. Government both taxes and demands a monopoly of defensive services within a geographical area.

Main objection to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is rational expectations - they can't prevent entrepreneurs from making use of loose credit because they would be left behind if they didn't.

Progressive, proportional and regressive taxes. Rothbard is relentlessly not in favor of taxes. The state robs both rich and poor.

Price controls, product controls, compulsory cartels, licenses, standards, tariffs, child labor laws, conscription, minimum wage laws, subsidies, penalties, anti-trust, conservation laws, patents, public utilities, eminent domain, and bribery are among the many triangular interventions by government that distort markets and reduce benefits to con