“In the direct handling of economic life, governments are usually clumsy and ineffective. ...Their main business should be that of traffic cop, not that of driver, and above all not that of back-seat driver.”

“A return to Austrian School tenets, both in capital theory and in monetary theory, and also in business-cycle theory, is absolutely needed.”

The Stock Market, Credit and Capital Formation by Fritz Machlup (1931, 1940): translated from a revised version of the German edition by Vera C. Smith (a pdf file).  Read an interview with Machlup in the Austrian Economics Newsletter 

The Origin of Economic Theory: A Portrait of Richard Cantillon (1680–1734)

Many crucial Austrian insights have been found in the economics of Irish banker Richard Cantillon1  (1680–1734)

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Lionell Robbins The Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) First Edition

Lionell Robbins The Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932) First Edition

Murray N. Rothbard The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Paper Capture Plug-in

Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals. This concept of action contrasts to purely reflexive, or knee-jerk, behavior, which is not directed toward goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that primordial fact. In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act.

Ethics is the discipline, or what is called in classical philosophy the “science,” of what goals men should or should not pursue. All men have values and place positive or negative value judgments on goods, people, and events. Ethics is the discipline that provides standards for a moral critique of these value judgments. In the final analysis, either such a discipline exists and a rational or objective system of ethics is possible, or else each individual’s value judgments are ultimately arbitrary and solely a result of individual whim.

All the positivist procedures are based on the physical sciences. It is physics that knows or can know its “facts” and can test its conclusions against these facts, while being completely ignorant of its ultimate assumptions. In the sciences of human action, on the other hand, it is impossible to test conclusions. There is no laboratory where facts can be isolated and controlled; the “facts” of human history are complex ones, resultants of many causes.