[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.]

In previous posts I’ve mentioned the UK banking reform ideas spearheaded by UK MPs Douglas Carswell and Steve Baker with the support of Cobden Center founder and entrepreneur Toby Baxendale (see links at the end of this post). Baxendale sent me the following for posting here for discussion and commentary here on the Mises Blog, and also asked Steve Horwitz to post it on Coordination Problem (it’s up there at Another Banking Proposal from Toby Baxendale):

One of our most recent uploads is The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes, edited by Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, published first in 1957. It is an extremely inspiring book that collects the great writings and speeches of English liberals from the 18th to the 20th century.

WSJ: “As the U.S. economy struggles and flirts with the prospect of deflation, some central bank officials are publicly broaching a controversial idea: lifting inflation above the Fed’s informal target…. Both inside and outside the Fed, though, such an approach is controversial.

[This article, written in the year 1755, is excerpted from part 1, chapter 15 of An Essay on Economic Theory.]

Experience shows that trees, plants, and other kinds of vegetation can be increased to any quantity, to the extent that the land allocated to them can support.

A strange argument emerged overnight that illustrates how little even informed people understand about the market economy and its implications. This time the debate centers on a interesting case of a man in rural Tennessee who did not pay his fire-services fee, so the fire department let his house burn down. Here is the news report.

You can see that this incident is being used to attack libertarianism.

Video has been removed. 

The head of the Chicago Fed calls for inflation (“much more accommodation than we’ve put in place” so that “that the amount of excess savings that is taking place relative to investment is lowered”). One hundred percent (so far as I can tell) of the 175 comments at the WSJ’s report blast him for fallacious and dangerous thinking.

The New York Observer’s Joel Conason on the grim scenario of a Misesian world:

If the “Austrian” ideology prevailed in tearing down government, extirpating regulation and destroying public institutions, what would be left standing? Not much except giant corporations, mammoth banks and hedge funds, whose proprietors would then be able to completely dominate an increasingly impoverished, uneducated and undefended people.

[This excerpt from Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture discloses some plot details of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent]