Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. This article, which appeared in National Review in 1959, is the introduction to the new Mises Institute edition of Hazlitt’s Failure of the “New Economics.“
After the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, many well-intentioned people all over the country have been calling for increased gun control laws. However, economists tend to oppose gun control laws, since such laws generally pay no attention to basic economic issues.
In response to mounting controversy over the student loan industry, the House passed the Student Loan Sunshine Act by a large margin (414–3). The Act would require lenders to disclose any financial relationships they have with educational institutions, and it would prohibit certain questionable activities, such as lenders giving “gifts” to the employees in a school’s financial aid office.
The world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States and Europe that freedom hadn’t worked well. What we needed were strong leaders to manage and plan economies and societies.
The tongue is a discerning instrument; in the hands of a traveled soda aficionado, it is capable of leading to insightful truths about politics. To the drinker who has imbibed foreign sodas, this truth stems from the peculiar, yet incontrovertible fact that American soda is not so hot.
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised—a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
A persistent virus is beginning to spread, threatening to sweep the country as the next great epidemic. What is the ill? The Fourier Complex of course. The Fourier Complex? Yes, it is the mental state—syndrome—identified by its vile symptoms: extreme envy, fear of the free market, belief in redistribution, and the desire to legislate deprivation in order to harm those better off.
Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” begins:
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible: the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls.
From time to time over the last 30 years, after I have talked or written about some new restriction on human liberty in the economic field, some new attack on private enterprise, I have been asked in person or received a letter asking, “What can I do”—to fight the inflationist or socialist trend? Other writers or lecturers, I find, are often asked the same question.
Years of spending, inflating, taxing, and redistributing has left the US economy teetering on a recession that our best and brightest—meaning the ones who created this mess—claim requires a multibillion-dollar economic-relief package to quell fears, promote confidence, and spur recovery.
And, one might add, to keep things calm past election time, which is the real purpose of this bipartisan effort to “stimulate” the economy out of recession fears.
