[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995). An MP3 audio file of this chapter, narrated by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

“Alienation,” to Marx, bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late-20th-century Marxoid intellectuals. It did not mean a psychological feeling, of anxiety or estrangement, which could somehow be blamed on capitalism, or on cultural or sexual “repression.” Alienation, for Marx, was far more fundamental, more cosmic.

“Without question, the legal system is the one facet of society that supposedly requires State provision. Even such champions of laissez-faire as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises believed a government must exist to protect private property and define the “rules of the game.” However, their arguments focused on the necessity of law itself. They simply assumed that the market is incapable of defining and protecting property rights. They were wrong. I argue that the elimination of the State will not lead to lawless chaos.

[Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government • By Thomas J. DiLorenzo • Mises Institute, 2012 • xi + 219 pages]

In his writings on entrepreneurship Mises is careful to distinguish the pure entrepreneurial function of judgmental decision-making under uncertainty with the flesh-and-blood entrepreneur of history, “those who are especially eager to profi t from adjusting production to the expected changes in conditions, those who have more initiative, more venturesomeness, and a quicker eye than the crowd, the pushing and promoting pioneers of economic improvement: (Human Action, Scholars Edition, p. 255).

To honor Julia Child on her 100th birthday, Lynne Kiesling writes a nice post combining three of my favorite things: cooking, entrepreneurship theory, and Austrian economics. Good cooking is about the combination of heterogeneous resources, it requires experimentation and creativity, and it either works or it doesn’t. Most important:

Complete footage of his interview for the upcoming documentary The Bubble.

At President Barack Obama’s first rally of his 2012 reelection campaign at Ohio State University, he declared that, in the spirit of hope and change that he believes elected him, “We will finish what we started … and remind the world once more just why it is that the United States of America is the greatest nation on earth.” After reminding his audience that we have more in common as Americans than our political division suggests, he assured them, “I still believe in you, and I’m asking you to keep believing in me.”

“It thus has been demonstrated a priori, to those of us who have faith in the principles of economic science, that the exception indicated above is not justified, and that the production of security, like anything else, should be subject to the law of free competition. Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?”