From my Mises lecture at the 2004 Austrian Scholars Conference: It is no wonder that so many of freedom’s friends have been influenced by the Austrian economists. In the last 100 years, they have been the true political economists of liberty. The Austrian school of economics has enriched our understanding of the market economy and advanced the cause of freedom in our time.

Here is a group of prominent mainstream who got together to solve all the world’s problems in an efficient fashion. The first step was to assume you have $50 billion to spend. The second step was to spend it. Here is their wish list.

Even HUD is getting into the act of expanding the housing bubble. The newest program from the Housing and Urban Development Department will provide grants to low-income families to pay their down payment. The current inability of many to do so, according to HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, is “the single-greatest obstacle to homeownership.”

The government is never more arrogant than in the war-planning stage. It presumes all knowledge of time and place. It claims that it can anticipate every action and every reaction. It believes that nothing is more powerful than power itself, and so bombs dropped from the air can make any people anywhere bend to the wishes of the superstate. A government that believes in its own foreign policy omniscience and omnipotence is a dangerous government, not just to foreign peoples but also to its own citizens. [Full article]

Erich Mattei explains that reformist measures do not address the fundamental problem afflicting the nations waterways: river socialism.

A nice thoughtful piece by our man, Robert Blumen, on the the inflation and deflation debate. He takes a good look at some deflationist arguments in a fair and even-handed manner from an Austrian viewpoint. An excerpt:

Arnold Beichman writes in honor of the 60th anniversary of Hayek’s classic in the Washington Times: The Austrian-born Hayek who died in 1992, explained what he called “the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism.” In his later book, “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism,” he elaborated on his thesis, namely socialism could never work, no matter how it came to pass, whether by revolution and dictatorship, as in the

In his speech on May 20, 2004, a Fed Governor, Ben Bernanke, argued in favor of a gradual approach to interest rate policy settings. According to Bernanke, because policy makers do not have precise knowledge of how the economy will respond to a given change in interest rates it is logical that policy makers should proceed cautiously.