Roger W. Garrison

The recent flourishing of New Classical economics, and especially its Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT), has given a fresh hearing to the Old—but still developing—Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). While the New and the Old differ radically in both substance and methods, they exhibit a certain formal congruency that has captured the attention of both schools.

David Osterfeld

Traders Versus the State: Anthropological Approaches to Unofficial Economics, by Gracia Clark (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988).

Traders Versus the State: Anthropological Approaches to Unofficial Economics is at once both a frustrating book to read and a fascinating book to review. One might suppose from its title that the book deals with conflict between government officials on the one hand and those engaged in trading or merchandising on the other.

Israel Kirzner is a name familiar to all readers of the Review of Austrian Economics. Kirzner’s association with Austrian economics began with the inception of his long and distinguished career. He attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at New York University for many years and received his doctorate under the aegis of the great Austrian. His thesis concerns the history of doctrine, and another of his works is a textbook on price theory.

Few books on the history of economics begin with a discussion of physics, but Mirowski’s brilliant work is no ordinary book. He contends that economics, culminating in the currently dominant neoclassical school, has throughout its history been controlled by a metaphor.

Robert Formaini’s illuminating work throws into question a key doctrine of social planners not satisfied with the free market. A common argument for the market emphasizes consumer sovereignty: the goods and services produced in a free economy will be those demanded by consumers, since profit-making entrepreneurs have every incentive to produce what consumers wish. Those who will not or cannot do so find themselves rapidly replaced by those more alive to the market’s signals.

Richard K. Vedder and Lowell Gallaway

It seems inevitable that some Ph.D. student in economics some time soon will pick up a recent copy of the Economic Report of the President looking for a dissertation topic and learn that there was a Great Depression in 1946, a topic which he or she will then analyze using all the tools of modern economic analysis.

Jeffrey M. Herbener

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders: no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern: the interests of everyone hang on the result.

Murray N. Rothbard

At the root of the dazzling revolutionary implosion and collapse of socialism and central planning in the “socialist bloc” is what everyone concedes to be a disastrous economic failure. The peoples and the intellectuals of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are crying out not only for free speech, democratic assembly, and glasnost, but also for private property and free markets.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I

As a result of the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in World War II, there were 10 million refugees living on a significantly reduced German territory; 40 percent of the population was bombed-out (the population of Cologne, for instance, had declined from 750,000 to 32,000) and 60 percent was undernourished.

Alexander Tabarrok

A standard theorem in neoclassical public finance holds that income taxes are preferred to equal revenue excise taxes.1 Herbener (1988) rejects this theorem because the proof is (a) based upon methodologically suspect indifference curves and (b) must follow a certain conceptual ordering—na