Other Schools of Thought

The following edited comments are excerpted from a recent email discussion with Walter Block and one of his correspondents, a Philosophy Professor

The libertarian creed, writes Murray Rothbard, emerged from the "classical liberal" movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world.

Writes George Reisman: What the UAW has done, on the foundation of coercive, interventionist labor legislation, is bring a once-great company to its knees.

Writes Jeffrey Tucker: even that law which appears to be a mere guideline and a help--such as a stop sign--must ultimately be enforced by jails and violence.
 

F.A. Hayek is known for making a number of important contributions to economics and social thought. If one had to identify a single concept that captures the thrust of Hayek’s intellectual project it would be “spontaneous order.”

Richard Cantillon was quite Misesian before Mises. He wrote of utility theory and the entrepreneur’s uncertainty in the 1970s. Cantillon was a great money practitioner. He became a bank and banker to the Jacobite Stuart line and to John Law who launched paper money inflation.

The Nobel award to F.A. Hayek in 1974 went directly against the tradition of that prize to go only to mathematical forecasters, left-liberals, and government central planners. Not only was Hayek’s work pioneering, but it is also the only correct analysis of business cycles past, present and future since they began in the mid-18th century.

History is not an inevitable march upward, as concluded in the 1830s. That determinist view put the stamp of approval on everything past and present. It permeates economic history. It ignores the great moral choices. History is a race between state power and social power.

Carl Menger, 1840-1921, founded Austrian economics. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk was the most important student.  Weiser was his brother-in-law, but was fairly pre-Keynesian. Mises was the great successor to Bohn-Bawerk.