Economists have long believed that government’s tax and expenditure policy either is, or can readily be made to be, neutral to the market. Free-market economists have advocated such neutrality of government, and even economists favoring redistributive actions by government have believed that the service activities and the redistributive activities of government can easily be distinguished, at least in concept.
Ludwig von Mises’ The Theory of Money and Credit is, quite simply, one of the outstanding contributions to economic thought in the twentieth century. It came as the culmination and fulfillment of the “Austrian School” of economics, and yet, in so doing, founded a new school of thought of its own.
Jeff Tucker Burke.PDF Acrobat PDFWriter 4.05 for Windows NT Capitalism
[From New Directions in Austrian Economics, edited with an introduction by Louis M. Spadaro (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel [1978]), pp. 143–56) and The Logic of Action I: Method, Money, the the Austrian School (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar and Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1997), chap. 16, pp. 337–49.]
The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its “strategic intelligence” in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors” (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace.
Scientism and Values, Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand), 1960; The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 3-23.
Until a few years ago, the conservative spectrum could be comfortably sundered into the “traditionalists” at one pole, the “libertarians” at the other, and the “fusionists” as either judicious synthesizers or muddled moderates (depending on one’s point of view) in between.
The flat tax draws virtually unanimous support from the “right-thinking” intellectuals in our society, including academics, writers, and media pundits—all people who have managed successfully to identify their own views, whatever they may be, with the general welfare. Any policy that draws unanimous support from these people can’t be all good. There must be a catch somewhere.
Editors note: On Aug. 8, 1957, Murray N. Rothbard wrote to Richard C. Cornuelle of the Volker Fund, strongly recommending Emil Kauder’s reseaches into the Aristotelian background of marginal utility and Austrian economic theory (Rothbard Papers). In a memo of February 1957, “Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism,” reproduced below, Rothbard set down some thoughts on these matters. Rothbard’s letters reveal an early and keen interest in the history of economic thought.
