Suffice it to say, there are plenty of positive things to be said about Poland’s post-communist trajectory. Within the past 5-10 years, it isn’t difficult to stumble across articles praising the Polish economy as an example of what would happen after abandonment of socialism for something that resembles a market economy.
Carl Menger is remembered today as the founder of the Austrian School of Economics and one of the most important economic thinkers in history. His 1871 masterpiece, Principles of Economics, launched what became known as the Marginal Revolution, overturning centuries of economic orthodoxy and fundamentally changing the way economists understand value, prices, and human action.
In every great war monetary calculation was disrupted by inflation. … The economic behavior of the belligerents was thereby led astray; the true consequences of the war were removed from their view. One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism.
[Excerpt from Murray N. Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2005), part 4, pp. 400–24.]
Most critics of Austrian economics have little or no clue about the theory or what it explains. But it happens, albeit not often, that critics have at least cursory knowledge of the Austrian corpus. Such critics, far and wide between, tend to target Mises’s praxeology rather than the economic theory per se. They obviously consider the logic of action a low-hanging fruit. The problem is that they pick it from the wrong tree.
