Ludwig von Mises didn’t like references to the “miracle” of the marketplace or the “magic” of production or other terms that suggest that economic systems depend on some force that is beyond human comprehension. In his view, we are better off coming to a rational understanding of why markets are responsible for astounding levels of productivity that can support exponential increases in population and ever higher living standards.

The most common misunderstanding about economics is that it is only about money and commerce. The next step is easy: I care about more than money, and so should everyone, so let’s leave economics to stockjobbers and money managers and otherwise dispense with its teachings. This is a fateful error, because, as Mises says, economics concerns everyone and everything. It is the very pith of civilization.

The economics profession has made a sharp turn to the left as was evident at the last meeting of the American Economic Association. Gone was any praise of tax cuts and private property, or criticism of federal spending and regulation. Instead, there were reassertions of Keynesian falsehoods, mathematical treatises with no economic content whatsoever, and an attempted (and mistaken) extension of economics into sex and religion.

Everyone is at work on a “stimulus plan” for doing something about the recession. But the much-publicized disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats is not about economic theory as such. There has been no critical thinking applied to the subject of why the recession, the longest in the postwar period, continues. Rather, the disagreement is about which levers to pull when, and who should get the benefits.

The planned economy was all the rage in 1937, when Prentice-Hall published a 1,000-page tome on The Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium by Thirty-Five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen. The “question that confronts us today is not if we shall plan, but how we shall plan,” wrote Lewis Mumford in the Foreword. All the contributors—Keynesian, socialist, communist, and fascist—agreed with that point, including such luminaries as Sidney Hook, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin.

When a congressman cites the Constitution, I’m glad to hear it mentioned, but I know he’s subverting it with every vote he casts. That’s how I felt when left-wing economist Robert Heilbroner said in the New Yorker that “Mises was right” about socialism.

Ludwig von Mises was never able to get a paid academic post in the United States. He was shut out of American economic journals, and boycotted and ridiculed by the establishment—all because he told the truth, without fear or compromise, when it wasn’t fashionable to do so.

The more time you spend with Austrian economists or libertarian intellectuals, the more you realize that Murray Rothbard’s influence has been underestimated. No, his name is not a household word (yet) but his influence is felt in another way: those who read him experience what amounts to the intellectual challenge of their lives. Whether that means adopting his paradigmatic approach to political economy, elaborating on a feature of his system, or attempting a refutation, once read, Rothbard seems inescapable.

We flatter ourselves, in this technological age driven by financial innovation and mind-boggling efficiencies, that we know more than any previous generation. But there is lost knowledge, among which is the knowledge of what sound money feels and looks like, what it does, who makes it and why, and how it holds its value.

Anything dismissed as “Victorian” these days is bound to be virtuous and rare, yet so compelling to decent people that a mere mention scares the pants off libertines. I’m talking, of course, about sound banking, which the Wall Street Journal dismisses in an editorial as “Victorian Finance.”

It’s September 1992 and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan announces a big increase in the discount rate and bank reserve requirements. Interest rates and unemployment increase, the economy goes into a deeper recession, and Bush is defeated. But Greenspan has no apologies: as a nonpartisan servant of the public, his policies must “focus only on what’s good for the economic health of America. The boom was hurting our country; we had to purge the malinvestments to make way for long-lasting growth.”