History of the Austrian School of Economics

"[I]f the glorious public sector, if expanded government, has brought us to this pretty pass, perhaps the answer is to roll government back, to return to the truly revolutionary path of dismantling the Big State."

The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it makes the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the arbitrary and vacillating policies of governments, political parties, and pressure groups.

Rothbard is even more consistent and rigorous than I had imagined.

The point, once more, is not that the conservatives deployed bad arguments against the supposed extremism of Mises and Rothbard. Rather, they downgraded the role of reason as such; and this rendered ineffective their resistance to the Left.

Murray Rothbard's two volumes are a monument of 20th-century scholarship.

Reisman shows himself ever alert to defend capitalism against objection, and I found especially impressive his demolition of Marx's argument that profit derives from exploiting labor.

If pushed too far, Cowen's line of thought could lead to an undue subjectivism, in which people's perceptions and classifications, rather than what actually occurs, would be the sole issues of importance.

Although Mises's books were often criticized severely when they appeared, his analyses of market operations, money, inflation, government intervention, and Communism, all firmly based on human action principles, live on and are gaining increasingly serious attention from scholars.

Rothbard has in addition a carefully worked out theory, Austrian economics, to guide him.

But if one believes, as the present author does, that the fundamental paradigms of modern, 20th-century philosophy and the social sciences have been grievously flawed and fallacious from the very beginning, including the aping of the physical sciences, then one is justified in a call for a radical and fundamental reconstruction of all these disciplines, and the opening up of the current specialized bureaucracies in the social sciences to a total critique of their assumptions and procedures.