History of the Austrian School of Economics

Mises was not one to praise individual economists very often. But he still had his favorites.

Even Marx was forced to admit that workers were not being paid at subsistence levels, and that capitalism led to a rising standard of living for workers. So in order to save his theory, he redefined the concept of subsistence.

The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguished it from precapitalist methods of production is capitalism's efforts to make goods and services available to everyone — not just the wealthy.

Things might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. Without them, it might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny.

Writing about the cultural background of Ludwig von Mises, an eminent former compatriot of mine, poses some difficulties: how to present you with a world radically different from yours, a world far away, which in many ways no longer exists.

The characteristic principle of capitalism is that it is mass production to supply the masses. Big business serves the many.

There is no other means to attain full employment, rising real wage rates and a high standard of living for the common man than private initiative and free enterprise.

Mises's fundamental accomplishment was to take the theory of marginal utility and apply it to the demand for and the value, or the price, of money. 

There is a field where Austrians are being heard and where Austrian theory is tremendously influential, and that field is dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism.

Jeff Deist and Mark Thornton discuss the works of one of the fathers of modern economics: Richard Cantillon.