Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures in the Private Sector. By Donald R. Hoke. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Until recent years, the history of technology used to be written, and taught, for its own sake and almost completely isolated from economic and social history. Who among us has not had his eyes glaze over at tedious recitations of the technology of the flying shuttle, or the power loom, or the open-hearth process?
The Limits of Government. By David Schmidtz. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991.
David Schmidtz’s illuminating new book subjects to careful examination a key argument used to justify governmental intervention into the free market. Some economic goods, it is alleged, the market cannot produce efficiently. Roughly speaking, goods will be produced if the gains expected by their producers exceed the costs involved in their manufacture. Some goods, e.g., national defense, have features that skew the market from an approach to efficiency.
Ludwig von Mises on Principle
Larry J. Eshelman
Ludwig von Mises was one of this century’s most principled and uncompromising defenders of laissez faire. He was also an outspoken advocate of utilitarianism and the doctrine of social expediency, and a critic of any kind of objective ethics such as natural law or natural rights. This raises the obvious question as to how successful Mises was in turning the sow’s ear of social expediency into the silk purse of laissez faire.
The Impetus for Recognizing Private Property and Adopting Ethical Behavior in a Market Economy: Natural Law, Government Law, or Evolving Self-Interest
Bruce L. Benson
I.
The Protectionist Roots of Antitrust
Donald J. Boudreaux and Thomas J. DiLorenzo
I.
Toward a Deconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics
David Gordon
Welfare Economics and Externalities in an Open-Ended Universe: A Modern Austrian Perspective. By Roy E. Cordato. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.
Roy Cordato’s ambitious and well-organized book addresses a central problem in economics. Standard neoclassical analysis finds fault with the unhampered free market, on a ground that Austrian economists resolutely reject.
Mises and Hayek Dehomogenized
Joseph T. Salerno
A Man of Principle: Essays in Honor of Hans F. Sennholz. John W. Robbins and Mark Spangler, eds.
Capitalism and Individualism. By Tibor Machan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Tibor Machan is not the philosopher than whom no more productive can be conceived—that distinction belongs to Nicholas Rescher. But no other philosopher rivals Machan in his relentless stream of books, articles, and—not to be forgotten—letters to the editor in defense of a free society. Capitalism and Individualism ranks as one of Machan’s best works. Its thesis deserves to arouse wide discussion among economists.
Swimming Against the Tide in Contemporary Philosophy. By Henry B. Veatch. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990.
In the past several years a number of economists centered at George Mason University have claimed to find an affinity between Austrian economics and certain types of Continental philosophy. Their views have not gone uncontested: Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppe have assailed the “hermeneuticists” with characteristic vigor. I fear I am no unbiased witness, as I have played a minor part in the controversy.
Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics
Paul A. Cantor
One may say that, apart from wars and revolutions, there is nothing in our modern civilizations which compares in importance to [inflation]. The upheavals caused by inflations are so profound that people prefer to hush them up and conceal them.
—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
