The social contract in autocracies and totalitarian dictatorships is characterized by the fact that power is always at the top of the triangle: state, business, society—business and society’s nominal weight is always less than that of the state. In particular, this pattern of social structure is typical for Russia: society and business are in a subordinate position to power.
Or rather, in the case of Somalia, we never stopped – and we just keep doing it!
As the Biden administration orders U.S. troops to back to Somalia in significant numbers, several things are worth noting in opposition to yet another military response to a faraway crisis of small stakes and absolutely no consequence to Americans.
When the German professors attached the epithet “Austrian” to the theories of Menger and his two earliest followers and continuators, they meant it in a pejorative sense.
The hostility that the teachings of Classical economic theory encountered on the European continent was primarily caused by political prepossessions. Political economy as developed by several generations of English thinkers, brilliantly expounded by Hume and Adam Smith and perfected by Ricardo, was the most exquisite outcome of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It was the gist of the liberal doctrine that aimed at the establishment of representative government and equality of all individuals under the law.
What is known as the Austrian School of Economics started in 1871 when Carl Menger published a slender volume under the title Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre.
Fiat inflation is a juggernaut of social, economic, cultural, and spiritual destruction.
—Guido Hülsmann, The Ethics of Money Production
One of my areas of research in institutional economics is the social behavior of people under different political regimes, what Thomas Schelling called micromotives and macrobehavior. Of course, this topic is directly related to many disciplines, from behavioral economics and political theory to the neurobiology of decision-making and the theory of biological markets.
