[Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)]

With the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic which eventually provided the context — or rather, pretext — for America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore.

[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995).]

Paul Krugman and Brad Delong have recently tag-teamed in blog posts (here and here) to again attempt to discredit Austrian economics in general and Ludwig von Mises in particular.

“The drive for a $10,000,000,000 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development illustrates once more the fetish of machinery that possesses the minds of the governmental delegates at Bretton Woods. Like the proposed $8,800,000,000 International Monetary Fund, it rests on the assumption that nothing will be done right unless a grandiose formal intergovernmental institution is set up to do it. It assumes that nothing will be run well unless Governments run it. One institution is to be piled upon another, even though their functions duplicate each other.

The most recent episodes of unsustainable booms (centered on digital technology in the 1990s and housing in the 2000s) have rekindled interest in the clash between Keynes and Hayek.