Prior to Mises there had been nothing written on the theory of monopoly price. Mises felt there could be some limited times of monopoly on the free market, e.g. diamond mines, but Rothbard felt that there could not be monopolies. Both theories developed out of Menger’s original thoughts.
Where the classical economists had gone wrong was to speak of goods as if they were abstract classes. The Austrians noted that their value theory did not talk about concrete units and could not explain how individuals valued goods.
There were reasons for the decline of the Austrian School before its revival and rebirth by Mises and Rothbard. There was an Israel Kirzner view in the 1970s that the Keynesian avalanche had buried Austrian economics in 1936. Then there is a big bang theory of its rebirth in 1974 due to the South Royalton meeting and Hayek receiving the Nobel Prize.
For the editors of The Changing Face of Economics (Colander, Holt, and Rosser, University of Michigan Press, 2004) "cutting edge" is more than a phrase.
Mahoney argues that although Mises correctly conceived of value as an ordinal relation, precluding the possibility of value imputation, in many of his expositions of the market process he adopts a notion of value as a cardinal thing in explaining the task confronting actors in either the planned or unplanned economy.
A common rejoinder to the program of laissez-faire is that market failures require government intervention. Just what does market failure mean, asks Gil Guilory.
With the death of Pope John Paul II last week, writes Christopher Westley, many have compared his intellectual contributions to those of Ludwig von Mises.
Before sober minds can consider the difficult matter of anarchism, writes Robert Murphy, we first need to clear away the confusion.
Jacques Chirac seems to be on the verge of waging all out war against the gravest possible threat to his country: ultra-liberalism (hint: that̵
This article published in the Monthly Review, March 2005, meaning this year, not a century a
