I am a believer in the power of liberty — voluntary relationships — to bring out the best in individuals and, therefore, society. But that well-founded belief makes it painful to see markets (willing exchange) blamed for virtually everything someone can think to object to, in favor of coercion of some by others via government, inspired by some utopian vision that cannot actually be achieved by that coercion.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk was an economist, lawyer, finance minister, teacher, and a founding figure of the Austrian School of economics. Born in 1851 in the city of Brno in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Böhm-Bawerk was initially trained as a lawyer at the University of Vienna. During his education, he first read Menger’s Principles of Economics and it immediately transformed him into an economist. Although he never studied economics under Menger directly, he quickly became an adherent of his work.

Philosopher Alexander Moseley offers a straightforward definition of political realism as “tak[ing] as its assumption that power is (or ought to be) the primary end of political action, whether in the domestic or international arena.” Realism thus provides a prism through which to observe and to appraise political phenomena, dispensing with the illusions that have built up around the modern state.

You’ve all heard the story of the Manhattan socialite who expressed shock at Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory because “nobody I know voted for him.” (Attributed variously to Pauline Kael, Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and others, and probably apocryphal, but who cares; it’s a great quote.) I was reminded of this by a line in Larry Summers’s confidential 2008 economic policy memo now making the rounds, courtesy of the New Yorker

The financial-market crisis is not over but has grown into a vicious sovereign-debt crisis. Nevertheless, monetary policy makers of the major economies go on to practice the same sort of policy that has led to the crisis. Following the model of inflation targeting, they continue to disregard the quantity of money and the amount and kind of credit creation. As they did before, central bankers cut interest rates as low as they can.

Recently reported in the MIT Technology Review was the results of research modeling billions of interactions between buyers and sellers. The data would appear to undermine the argument used to defend invasive regulation, price-fixing, and anti-trust laws, which operate under the assumption that all inconvenient price increases must be the result of shady conspiracies by industry leaders.