Mises was the premier Austrian economist of his generation, whose legacy reveals him to be the greatest economist of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly, he kept the embers of free-market economics burning during the interwar years.
Public opinion looks askance at wealth acquired in trade and industry, and finds it pardonable only if the owner atones for it by endowing charitable institutions.
But what both the classical and the historical schools have neglected, the Austrian School is today trying to accomplish.
We may either incorporate ourselves into market civilization, the system by which we may serve ourselves as ends by serving other people as means, or return to the idyllic and isolated "noble" savagery that long characterized our human past.
The question of the relation of cost to value is properly only a concrete form of a much more general question — the question of the regular relations between the values of such goods as in causal interdependence contribute to one and the same utility for our well-being.
The Memoranum did not only denounce debasement and call for a high-valued currency, but it also enunciated "Gresham's law" that the cause of a shortage of gold coin in England was the legal undervaluation of gold.
Rothbard’s vast published output does not exhaust his thinking and writing.
Rothbard maintains that one cannot consistently combine libertarian economic policies with international belligerence.
In the conviction of the inadequacy of the classical political economy, the Austrian economists and the adherents of the historical school agree. But in regard to the final cause of the inadequacy, there is a fundamental difference of opinion that has led to a lively contention over methods.
