In the midst of war and emergency declarations from the U.S. Department of Justice, we find that the government lawyers who dominate much of the national discourse have not been concentrating exclusively on “national security.”
No, John Ashcroft’s minions are trying to gain a new source of government revenue by again looting U.S. tobacco companies—and further destroying the U.S. Constitution in the process. It is not enough for the U.S. Government to be waging war against Iraq; it must also continue to war against Americans as well.
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Human interactions can be located on an axis running between two polar ideas, persuasion and aggression. I am not contending that this is the only way we can evaluate human action, only that it is a useful way.
As pointed out by Professor Kirzner (2001, pp. 137, 140), Mises did not start out with the intent to develop a theory of the trade cycle. The trade cycle argument first appeared in the last few pages of The Theory of Money and Credit (1912). This early development of Austrian business cycle theory was a direct manifestation of Mises’s rejection of the concept of neutral money and “emerged as an almost incidental by-product of his exploration of the theory of banking …” (Kirzner 2001, p. 140).
