“The economist must deal with doctrines, and not with men.  It is for him to critique errant doctrine; it is not his charge to uncover the personal motives behind heterodoxy.  The economist must face his opponents under the fictitious assumption that they are guided by objective considerations alone.  It is irrelevant whether the advocate of a false notion acts in good or bad faith; what matters is if the stated notion is true or false.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Memoirs

From the description:

In this never-before-seen video, Rothbard gives a tribute to his mentor in Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises, at a Libertarian Party convention in Pennsylvania in 1984. Rothbard discusses Mises’s work and life, and the growing popularization of his ideas in the United States. Download an .mp3 version of this lecture here: http://bit.ly/Kh4jBj Please note: The audio cuts out for a few seconds at the three-minute mark due to the age of the original tape.

“Marxism makes use of the same method with regard to modern subjective economics.  Unable to oppose it by a single word of reasonable criticism, the Marxian tries to dispose of it by denouncing it as ‘bourgeois economics.’  To show that subjective economics is not ‘capitalist apologetics’ it should be sufficient, surely, to point out that there are socialists who stand firmly by the theory of subjective value.  The evolution of economics is a process of the mind, independent of the supposed class interests of economists, and has nothing

[From a memorandum, dated April 24, 1946, prepared in English by Professor Mises for a committee of businessmen for whom he served as a consultant, this article appears in The Causes of the Economic Crisis, and Other Essays Before and After the Great Depression (2006) as chapter 5, “The Trade Cycle and Credit Expansion: The Economic Consequences of Cheap Money.”]

“Economics, like logic and mathematics, is a display of abstract reasoning.  Economics can never be experimental and empirical.  The economist does not need an expensive apparatus for the conduct of his studies.  What he needs is the power to think clearly and to discern in the wilderness of events what is essential from what is merely accidental.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action:  A Treatise on Economics

[End This Depression Now! By Paul Krugman. Norton, 2012. Xii + 259 pages]