The people who design advertising and political campaigns know that if they can frame the issues, they’ve already won. In an economics context, I’ve previously alluded to euphemisms for tax hikes, and how in grad school we actually used the term “social-planner’s solution“ to denote the ideal use of resources. How can an Austrian economist fight back against the “planning” mentality when every PhD student has had this terminology burned in his or her mind?

From time immemorial men have prattled about the blissful conditions their ancestors enjoyed in the original “state of nature.” From old myths, fables, and poems the image of this primitive happiness passed into many popular philosophies of the 17th and 18th centuries. In their language, the term natural denoted what was good and beneficial in human affairs, while the term civilization had the connotation of opprobrium.

[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

A small set of ideas does most of the heavy lifting in economics. “Ten Principles of Economics” or “Ten Big Ideas” or “Ten Key Elements of Economics” are pretty standard in most introductory economics books. Here’s my version, based on Chapter 1 of The Economic Way of Thinking.

Today is a historic day in Austrian economics. Today a Ph.D.-level seminar in Austrian economics commences at the University of Missouri. What is so important about this event is that the course is not part of a niche Austrian program dependent on external funding, but is part of the regular curriculum of a mainstream program at a major research university. This is a clear signal that Austrian economics is beginning to be taken seriously by mainstream economists. The course is being taught by Professor Peter Klein, a former student of Nobel Prize winner Oliver Williamson.

The changes in the data whose reiterated emergence prevents the economic system from turning into an evenly rotating economy and produces again and again entrepreneurial profit and loss are favorable to some members of society and unfavorable to others. Hence, people concluded, the gain of one man is the damage of another; no man profits but by the loss of others.