[Excerpted from As We Go Marching (1944). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Nathaniel Foote, is available for download.]

[This article originally appeared in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon (1986). It has never before appeared online. An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Nathaniel Foote, is available for download.]

[In Restraint of Trade (2008)]

Until relatively recent times, the symbiotic relationship existing between economic and political institutions has only been vaguely comprehended. It has been popular to view these two major sectors of American society as having a generally antagonistic relationship, with political institutions serving as a countervailing force to economic influence.

I listened to this “Freakonomics” podcast on fire safety, and not only does it have nothing to do with economics, it would seem that the people behind it are entirely unfamiliar with the economic way of thinking.

The podcast starts by telling us that fire deaths decreased by about 90% over the course of the twentieth century. These days, there are only about 3,000 deaths from fire in the U.S. each year. Great.

Expenditures under the Social Security and Medicare programs account for approximately one-third of total federal government spending.1 It is obvious that any major reduction in government spending requires major reductions in spending for these programs.

And his crime? His unique form of terrorism? He minted silver and copper coins and sold them. In other words, he did what innumerable entrepreneurs from the beginning of time have done. He attempted to provide consumers with a store of value. No one was forced to buy. He met a market demand, and that’s it.

The astonishing popularity of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video — which became the YouTube meme of all memes in the course of a wild six weeks — has mystified many critics.

Was it shared and watched so wildly because it was so bad? Certainly the overwhelming judgment on the part of viewers is that it is atrocious — and yet it is hard to know what that means, since 85 million people not only watched the video but also downloaded the song, bought the ring tone, and devoured every available bit of news about the singer and the song.

The Austrian theory of money virtually begins and ends with Ludwig von Mises’s monumental Theory of Money and Credit, published in 1912.1 Mises’s fundamental accomplishment was to take the theory of marginal utility, built up by Austrian economists and other marginal