[This article is excerpted from Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism]
Carl Menger was born in 1840 in the Galician town of Neu-Sandez (today located in Poland). His father was a lawyer from a family of army officers and civil servants; his mother came from a rich Bohemian merchant family that had moved to Galicia. His full name was Carl Menger Edler von Wolfesgrün, but he and his brothers—the influential politician Max and the socialist legal scholar Anton—did not use their title of nobility.
Chapter 11: Monopoly and Competition
We’re entering the wild, wonderful world of monopoly and competition. To sum up from the last lecture, what’s happened is that the words “monopoly” and “competition” have been changed. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and also in the mind of the ordinary person even today, what competition means is competing; in other words, rivalry, trying to offer a better product or a cheaper price than the other guy, the next guy in the industry.
Chapter 10: The Division of Labor Clarified
I have come to realize, since writing this essay, that I overweighted the contributions and importance of Adam Smith on the division of labor. And to my surprise, I did not sufficiently appreciate the contributions of Ludwig von Mises.
Chapter 9: Exchange and the Division of Labor
It is now time to bring other men into our Robinsonian idyll—to extend our analysis to interpersonal relations. The problem for our analysis is not simply more people: after all, we could simply postulate a world of a million Crusoes on a million isolated islands, and our analysis would not need to be expanded by one iota. The problem is to analyze the interaction of these people. Friday, for example, might land in another part of the island, and make contact with Crusoe, or he might land on a separate island, and then later construct a boat that could reach the other island.
Section III: Principles of Economics and Government Intervention
Chapter 8: Fundamentals of Value and Price
Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was born on September 29, 1881, in the city of Lemberg (present day Ukraine), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where his father, Arthur Edler von Mises, a distinguished construction engineer working for the Austrian railroads, was stationed. Growing up in Vienna, Mises entered the University of Vienna at the turn of the century to study for his graduate degree in law and economics. He died October 10, 1973, in New York City.
Late last week, UK PM David Cameron announced that UK and EU officials had come to an agreement that would give the UK a better “deal” as a member of the EU. That is, Cameron was forced by Euroskeptics in Britain to extract concessions from the EU government as a condition of staying in the EU.
The hope among Europhiles is that this will be a enough to convince the British voting population to vote to stay in the EU in a coming June 23 referendum on EU membership.
Several states — including Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska — have, for now, successfully nullified the federal prohibition on the possession, sale, and production of marijuana. But that doesn’t mean the federal government is totally powerless in the matter.
Robert Luddy explains today at The American Spectator how the Fed’s fixation on promoting price inflation is a big problem:
The Fed’s policies severely undermine the middle class by making goods and services more expensive. For example, an average American family loses $700 in purchasing power if inflation is 2% annually.
