From The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 10, No. 2, 1997.

     Back in the nineteen-seventies, inflation and unemployment were rapidly increasing together in the Western world, although according to the then ruling Keynesian priesthood they would never do so. By the end of the decade, the proudly proclaimed ability of the Keynesians to fine-tune the economy was shown to be a sham. Their performance records varied from country to country but the overall picture was bleak.

Reason is an ultimate given and cannot be analyzed or questioned by itself.
—Ludwig von Mises[1]

No person can disobey Reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature.
—Jonathan Swift[2]

Introduction

     ‘Law’, in the sense in which I shall use the word here, denotes an order of persons.1 Within this general concept, we can distinguish between natural orders and artificial orders. Natural order, that is natural law, is the order of natural persons.

In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen.

[Presidential address delivered before the London Economic Club; November 10 1936; Reprinted from Economica IV (new ser., 1937), 33-54.]

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974.

[From the University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949).]

From the Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 27, April 1961.

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This essay was originally given as a lecture before the Trustees and guests of the Foundation for Economic Education at Tarrytown, New York on May 18, 1970, and was first published in the first edition of The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays.