People tend to fall into habits and into unquestioned ruts, especially in the field of government. On the market, in society in general, we expect and accommodate rapidly to change, to the unending marvels and improvements of our civilization. New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly. But in the area of government we follow blindly in the path of centuries, content to believe that whatever has been must be right.

Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital. The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the seemingly insoluble problems of private operation. What we need to do is to reorient our thinking to consider a world in which all land areas are privately owned. Let us take, for example, police protection.

One of the undoubted consequences of all land areas in the country being owned by private individuals and companies would be a greater richness and diversity of American neighborhoods. The character of the police protection and the rules applied by the private police would depend on the wishes of the landowners or street owners, the owners of the given area. Thus, suspicious residential neighborhoods would insist that any people or cars entering the area have a prior appointment with a resident, or else be approved by a resident with a phone call from the gate.

If, in contrast, we examine the performance of governmental streets and highways in America, it is difficult to see how private ownership could pile up a more inefficient or irrational record. It is now widely recognized, for example, that federal and state governments, spurred by the lobbying of automobile companies, oil companies, tire companies, and construction contractors and unions, have indulged in a vast overexpansion of highways. The highways grant gross subsidies to the users and have played the major role in killing railroads as a viable enterprise.

Until the years 1973-1974, the Keynesians who had formed the ruling economic orthodoxy since the late 1930s had been riding high, wide, and handsome.1  Virtually everyone had accepted the Keynesian view that there is something in the free-market economy that makes it subject to swings of under- and overspending (in practice, the Keynesian concern is almost e

What, then, does this resurgent Austrian theory have to say about our problem?2  The first thing to point out is that inflation is not ineluctably built into the economy, nor is it a prerequisite for a growing and thriving world.

Inflating by simply printing more money, however, is now considered old-fashioned. For one thing, it is too visible; with a lot of high-denomination bills floating around, the public might get the troublesome idea that the cause of the unwelcome inflation is the government’s printing [p. 179] of all the bills — and the government might be stripped of that power.

The business cycle arrived in the Western world in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a curious phenomenon, because there seemed to be no reason for it, and indeed it had not existed before.