I want to focus on how these times relate to history and how we can change the future by applying the economic way of thinking. I am therefore going to draw your attention to four different themes.
If we are going to look at the current, dismal economy and blame somebody's policies for it, surely we can acquit Ron Paul. That doesn't by itself prove that Ron Paul's views are correct, but it certainly casts doubt on Krugman's constant claims.
Fiat money — or, to be more precise, its production — is already a violation of the free-market principle; and fractional-reserve banking amounts to leveraging the economic consequences of fiat money. Austrians favor a money that is freely chosen and operates by market principles.
The first self-conscious school of economic thought developed in France shortly after the publication of Cantillon's <i>Essai</i>. They called themselves "the economists" but later came to be called the "physiocrats," after their prime politico-economical principle: physiocracy (the rule of nature).
In our times, a major reason, and perhaps <i>the</i> major reason, for the phenomenal progress of the ideas of liberty is the work of the Mises Institute. This is the infrastructure that gives rise to and supports all the rest. We need your help.
Just before the beginning of the crisis, work produced by a variety of leading economists was very positive on the state of macroeconomics; it concluded that the field had made big advances in the last decades. A sample of their comments is offered below.
The envy-driven masses do not care a whit for what the demagogues call the "bourgeois" concern for freedom of conscience, of thought, of the press, for habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the rest. They long for the earthly paradise that the socialist leaders promise them.
As "left" and "right" categories dissolve and become increasingly meaningless on the American ideological scene, as young people, with the collapse of both the SDS-Left and the liberal "consensus," grope toward a new philosophy and a new orientation, right-libertarianism may ascend.
As with most regulations, the CFC ban hit the poor with a vengeance. Millions of perfectly functioning refrigerators could no longer be recharged with Freon, so everyone was forced to purchase new CFC-free appliances. This, of course, was especially difficult for those with low incomes.
