Rothbard A to Z

HANSEN, ALVIN

… leaped on the New Economics to become the leading American Keynesian …

Economic Controversies, p. 273

… the outstanding Keynesian disciple in [the United States].

Economic Depression, p. 44

… the renowned left Keynesian Alvin Henry Hansen, in his famous “stagnation” thesis of the late 1930s, forecast permanent stagnation … Hansen developed this doctrine as the logical outcome of a rigid Walrasian framework.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 209n5

The Hansen mature economy thesis is at least as worthless an explanation of economic reality as the rest of the Keynesian apparatus.

Strictly Confidential, p. 238

HAPPINESS

… economics discusses individuals’ aiming to maximize their utility or happiness or welfare …

Economic Controversies, p. 313

Life is not a race, but an attempt by each individual to be as happy as possible.

Economic Controversies, p. 568

… utility and general happiness require the private property and laissez-faire of the natural order.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 272

Manners are vital to the quality of life; civility is a crucial requirement of civilization. It softens edges, and makes social life worth living.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 261

… humor is one of the great joys of the world.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 262

… every individual has the right to be free and to try to find his happiness …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 448

… there is never any possibility of measuring increases or decreases in happiness …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 18

… it is not possible to measure changes in the happiness of any given person.… There is no possible unit of happiness that can be used for purposes of comparison and, hence, of addition or multiplication.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 19

HAYEK, FRIEDRICH VON

Hayek believes that Mises’s theory is somehow deficient because it is exogenous—because it holds that the generation of business cycles stems from interventionary acts rather than from acts of the market itself. This argument is difficult to fathom. Processes are either analyzed correctly or incorrectly; the only test of any analysis is its truth, not whether it is exogenous or endogenous.

America’s Great Depression, p. 33

… Hayek’s style, heavily Germanic rather than sparkling, [is] far less readable than Mises …

Betrayal of the American Right, p. 62

… Hayek’s work had incalculable effect in converting or helping to convert many socialist intellectuals to the individualist, capitalist ranks.

Betrayal of the American Right, p. 63

… Hayek has abandoned the gold standard completely on behalf of a composite-commodity standard …

Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar, p. 66n42

Hayek’s Austrian business cycle theory swept the younger economists in Britain precisely because it alone offered a satisfactory explanation of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Such future Keynesian leaders as John R. Hicks, Abba P. Lerner, Lionel Robbins, and Nicholas Kaldor in England, as well as Alvin Hansen in the United States, had been Hayekians only a few years earlier. Then, Keynes’s General Theory swept the boards after 1936 in a veritable “Keynesian Revolution” …

Economic Controversies, p. 777; For a New Liberty, p. 215

The Nobel Prize in economics granted to F.A. Hayek in 1974 has generally been credited with setting the spark for the Austrian revival, and there is much to be said for this thesis … Hayek’s Nobel prize in 1974, shared ironically with the leftist maverick Gunnar Myrdal, was the first one to be granted to a free-market economist. It is also significant that the first free-market Nobel went to Hayek, not for his later vaporings in “spontaneous order,” “knowledge,” “evolution,” and so on, for which he is unfortunately revered by most current Austrians, but instead for his elaboration of the Misesian business cycle theory which had been prominent in Britain in the 1930s, only to be swept away, in the late 1930s, by its great enemy, the Keynesian Revolution. To grant the first free-market Nobel to the antipode of Keynesian macro-theory cannot be considered a coincidence: it symbolized the end of the unquestioned dominance of the Keynesian-statist paradigm in economics.

Economic Controversies, p. 163

… the correct Austrian paradigm is and can only be the Misesian, that is, the paradigm of Misesian praxeology; that the competing Austrian paradigms, in particular the fundamentally irrational “evolved rules,” “knowledge,” “plans,” and “spontaneous order” paradigm of Hayek and the more extreme “ultra-subjectivist” or nihilist paradigm of Lachmann, have both been fallacious and pernicious …

Economic Controversies, pp. 168–69

Hayek is obsessed by Man’s allegedly pervasive and systemic ignorance. Indeed, Hayek’s virtually lone argument against government intervention and against socialism is that government planners can know nothing. Since reason can play little or no role in man’s affairs, government, or man through government, does not even know enough to establish general legal or constitutional rules for society. These general rules can only emerge from the blind, unconscious forces of “evolution” … For Hayekian Man, however, there is a way out: even though he knows virtually nothing, he can painfully learn through the processes of the free market, just as in law or constitutions, he can learn to accept the “evolved” rules.

Economic Controversies, p. 177

Hayekian Man, the Hayekian entrepreneur, starts by knowing nothing, but he painfully learns about the world and the market through the “signals” of the price system. Hayek, and Professor Israel Kirzner after him, habitually speak of the market, of competition on the market, as a “discovery process.” … Hayek-Kirzner see a world of knowledge out there, with the unconscious forces of the market supplying man with that knowledge, through market price and profit-and-loss signals. The Hayek-Kirzner entrepreneur, indeed, is strangely passive; he scarcely acts like an entrepreneur at all. He risks nothing, and he really knows nothing, except what the signals of the price-system teach him, as he and the market economy wend their way toward general equilibrium.

Economic Controversies, p. 178

The free price system is vital to the entrepreneur but it is not, as in Hayek-Kirzner, his only source of knowledge.

Economic Controversies, p. 179

For Hayek and the Hayekians, obsessed with the alleged “problem of knowledge,” have systematically misinterpreted Mises as maintaining solely that the Socialist Planning Board, facing the uncertainty of a dynamic economy, lacks the knowledge enabling it to plan the production and allocate the resources of a socialist economy.

Thus, to Hayek, if the Planning Board could by some magic know, as people come to know through the market, consumer values, technologies, and resources, it could rationally plan and allocate resources fully as well as the market. As usual for Hayek and the Hayekians, the argument for the free market and against statism rests only on an argument from ignorance.

Economic Controversies, p. 187

Hayek’s entire work, on the contrary, is devoted to a denigration of human reason.… Hayek virtually assumes that human beings act unconsciously—of course, a contradiction in terms—and therefore that they neither know nor think nor choose. Therefore, their actions do not require understanding; hence Hayek’s emphasis that the best that can be done is rely on a blind and unconscious adherence to evolved rules.

Economic Controversies, p. 192

It is interesting to note that what Hayek really meant about very many things is virtually a cottage industry for doctoral students, whereas it is rare that people have to puzzle over what Mises “really meant.”

Economic Controversies, p. 193n42

… Hayek stresses blind habit or custom.

Economic Controversies, p. 194

We need not tarry on the phrase “spontaneous order,” except to note that the word “spontaneous,” once again, connotes lack of thought, activity that is not consciously chosen, but rather purely reflexive and tropistic. It would have been far more accurate to use a term such as “voluntary,” which would at least focus on voluntarily chosen, rather than coerced, actions.

Economic Controversies, p. 195

… Hayek returns, with a burst, to the Whig theory of history and to a conservatism that justifies all institutions as “evolved,” as part of some presumably beneficent pattern …

Economic Controversies, p. 200

Hayek’s praise of the common law as spontaneous and undersigned overlooks the fact that individual judges were consciously discovering, elaborating and applying fundamental legal principles. Reason and design were therefore dominant in common law.

Economic Controversies, p. 201n51

In 1976, after Hayek succumbed to hubris upon winning the Nobel Prize, he opened the Pandora’s Box of money-crankism by offering a bizarre scheme for private competing currencies.… Hayek violated the rule for valid monetary theory that he himself had adumbrated as Hayek I: that it must, like Mises’s theory, be deduced from, and therefore integrated with, a sound general micro theory. Instead, Hayek’s doctrine was totally cut off from general economic theory.

Economic Controversies, pp. 205–06

… the reason why Hayek did not help spark an Austrian revival in the United States, despite his years of teaching at Chicago, is that Hayek was not the sort of teacher to ignite or inspire student interest.… Hayek did not have the personality as a teacher to inspire students or disciples. Unlike Mises, who was unfailingly charming and devoted to spurring productivity among his students, Hayek was cool and aloof, only answering specific questions put to him by his doctoral students, and never engaging them in conversation or discussion. Hence, Hayek did not help spark an Austrian revival.

Economic Controversies, pp. 219–20

Hayek is surely correct that a free market economy and a devotion to the right of private property requires that everyone be permitted to issue whatever proposed currency names and tickets they wish.

Economic Controversies, p. 758

Hayek’s plan for the denationalization of money is Utopian in the worst sense: not because it is radical, but because it would not and could not work.

Economic Controversies, pp. 759–60

… for Hayek, the major problem for the socialist planning board is its lack of knowledge. Without a market, the socialist planning board has no means of knowing the value-scales of the consumers, or the supply of resources or available technologies. The capitalist economy is, for Hayek, a valuable means of disseminating knowledge from one individual to another through the pricing “signals” of the free market.… Hence, as is usual for Hayek, the argument for the free economy and against statism rests on an argument from ignorance.

Economic Controversies, p. 845

… the entire Hayekian emphasis on “knowledge” is misplaced and misconceived.

Economic Controversies, p. 846

… the Hayek-Kirzner “entrepreneur” is curiously bloodless and passive, receiving and passively imbibing knowledge imparted to him by the market. The Hayek-Kirzner entrepreneur is far closer than they like to think to the Walrasian automaton, to the fictional “auctioneer” who avoids all real trades in the marketplace.

Economic Controversies, p. 847

Hayek’s proposal [for the denationalization of money] is absurdly “constructivist” on his own methodological terms.

Economic Controversies, p. 882n5

Unfortunately, the fundamental and grievous flaw in Hayek’s [political] system appears when he proceeds to define “coercion.”

Ethics of Liberty, p. 219

Hayek’s justification of the existence of the State, as well as its employment of taxation and other measures of aggressive violence, rests upon his untenable obliteration of the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, and his lumping of all violent actions into the single rubric of varying degrees of “coercion.”

Ethics of Liberty, p. 226

Let us postulate … a … society ruled by a vast network of Hayekian general rules, equally applicable to all, e.g., such rules as: everyone is to be enslaved every third year; no one may criticize the government under penalty of death; no one may drink alcoholic beverages; everyone must bow down to Mecca three times a day at specified hours; everyone must wear a specified green uniform, etc. It is clear that such a society, though meeting all the Hayekian criteria for a noncoercive rule of law, is thoroughly despotic and totalitarian.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 228

… a fundamental flaw in Hayek’s theory of individual rights … is that they do not stem from a moral theory or from “some independent nongovernmental social arrangement,” but instead flow from government itself. For Hayek government—and its rule—of law creates rights, rather than ratifies or defends them. It is no wonder that … Hayek comes to endorse a long list of government actions clearly invasive of the rights and liberties of the individual citizens.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 229

The free-market economist F.A. Hayek [was] in no sense an “extremist” …

For a New Liberty, p. 377

… Hayek is not exactly known as an intellectual gut-fighter.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 10

The process of Hayekian conversion assumes that everyone, or at least all intellectuals, are interested solely in the truth, and that economic self-interest never gets in the way. Anyone at all acquainted with intellectuals or academics should be disabused of this notion, and fast. Any libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion-molders are part of the fundamental problem, not just because of error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling system.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 39

… Hayek convert[ed] many of Britain’s leading young economists to Austrian (that is, Misesian) monetary, capital, and business-cycle theory.

Keynes, the Man, p. 41

Even though Hayek remained anti-Keynesian, he too was touched by the Keynesian charisma. Despite everything, Hayek was proud to call Keynes a friend and indeed promoted the legend that Keynes, at the end of his life, was about to convert from his own Keynesianism.

Keynes, the Man, p. 56

… statism and central planning lead straight to totalitarianism.

Keynes, the Man, p. 57

… Hayek too, while never succumbing to Keynes’s ideas, did fall under his charismatic spell. In addition to creating the legend of Keynes’s change of heart, why did Hayek not demolish The General Theory as he had Keynes’s Treatise on Money? Hayek admitted to a strategic error, that he had not bothered to do so because Keynes was notorious for changing his mind, so Hayek did not think then that The General Theory would last.

Keynes, the Man, p. 58

… Hayek ranks as the world’s most eminent free-market economist and advocate of the free society.… F.A. Hayek is not only the leading free-market economist; he has also led the way in attacking the mathematical models and the planning pretensions of the would be “scientists,” and in integrating economics into a wider libertarian social philosophy.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 515

… Hayek pioneered in demonstrating how socialism cannot rationally calculate because it lacks a free market pricing system, particularly since the free market is uniquely equipped to transmit information from every individual to all other individuals. Lacking a genuine price system, socialism is necessarily devoid of such crucial information. Furthermore, in the same work, Hayek brilliantly dissected the unrealistic orthodox model of “perfect competition,” demonstrating that the real world of free competition is far superior to the absurd call for “perfection” by trust-busting lawyers and economics. As a corollary, Hayek in this work began a devastating series of attacks on the mathematical economists’ model of “general equilibrium,” showing how absurd and unrealistic such a criterion was with which to beat free enterprise over the head.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 516

… Hayek’s proposal [for the denationalization of money] … is so irrelevant to our current monetary problems as to take on the aspect of a crank scheme.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 993

The later Hayekian stress on decentralized knowledge and innovations were important glosses and elaborations on the main Misesian point, but they were not the central issue. The central Misesian point is that, even given resources, values and technology, even abstracting from their changes, even then, socialism, deprived of private ownership and free markets, could not calculate or rationally allocate resources.

Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, p. 29

… Hayek warned that, in the long run, political and economic freedom go hand in hand. In particular, that “democratic socialism” is a contradiction in terms. A socialist economy will inevitably be dictatorial.

Making Economic Sense, p. 417

Converted from Fabian socialism by Ludwig von Mises’s devastating critique, Socialism, in the early 1920s …

Making Economic Sense, p. 446

… Hayek took his place as the greatest of the glittering generation of economists and social scientists who became followers of Mises in the Vienna of the 1920s … In particular, Hayek elaborated Mises’s brilliant business cycle theory, which demonstrates that boom-bust cycles are caused, not by mysterious defects inherent in industrial capitalism, but by the unfortunate inflationary bank credit expansion propelled by central banks.

Making Economic Sense, pp. 446–47

In later years Hayek conceded that the worst mistake of his life was to fail to write the sort of devastating refutation of the General Theory that he had done for the Treatise, but he had concluded that there was no point in doing so, since Keynes changed his mind so often.

Making Economic Sense, p. 448

In 1974, perhaps not coincidentally the year after his mentor Ludwig von Mises died, F.A. Hayek received the Nobel Prize. The first free-market economist to receive that honor, Hayek was accorded the prize explicitly for his elaboration of Misesian business cycle theory in the 1920s and ’30s.

Making Economic Sense, p. 449

… Hayek, instead of analyzing man as a rational, conscious, and purposive being, considered man to be irrational, acting virtually unconsciously and unknowingly.

Making Economic Sense, p. 449

Since Hayek was radically scornful of human reason, he could not, like John Locke or the Scholastics, elaborate a libertarian system of personal and property rights based on the insights of human reason into natural law. Nor could he, like Mises, emphasize man’s rational insight into the vital importance of laissez-faire for the flourishing and even survival of the human race, or of foregoing any coercive intervention into the vast and interdependent network of the free-market economy.

Instead, Hayek had to fall back on the importance of blindly obeying whatever social rules happened to have “evolved,” and his only feeble argument against intervention was that the government was even more irrational, and was even more ignorant, than individuals in the market economy.

It is sad commentary on academia and on intellectual life these days that Hayek’s thought, possibly because of its very muddle, inconsistency, and contradictions, should have attracted far more scholarly dissertations than Mises’s consistency and clarity. In the long run, however, it will be all too obvious that Mises has left us a grand intellectual and scientific system for the ages whereas Hayek’s lasting contribution will boil down to what was acknowledged by the Nobel committee—his elaboration of Misesian cycle theory. In addition, Hayek must always be honored for having the courage to stand shoulder to shoulder with his mentor, in the dark days of the interwar and postwar years, against the twin evils of socialism and Keynesianism.

Making Economic Sense, p. 450

In 1974, leading Mises student F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics, a startling change from previous Nobel awards, exclusively for mathematical Keynesians. 1974 was also the year after the death of the great modern Austrian theorist and champion of freedom, Ludwig von Mises. Hayek’s prize sparked a veritable revival in this long-forgotten school of economic thought.

Making Economic Sense, p. 461

Hayek showed us that the “worst get on top” in a collectivist regime. This is true for any government-run enterprise.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1266n9

… Hayek, doyen of the Austrian School of Economics, abandon[ed] the gold standard altogether and attempt[ed] to urge private banks to issue their own currencies, with their own particular names, which the government would allow to compete with its own money.

Mystery of Banking, p. 267

F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty is, surprisingly and distressingly, an extremely bad, and, I would even say, evil book.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 61

Hayek is a “composite of brilliant things, and very wrong things … a mosaic of confusion.”

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 62

Reason is his bête noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 63

… he doesn’t seem to fully realize the paradox of using reason, as he tries to do, to attack reason.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 64

… Hayek doesn’t see any significance to natural law or rights …

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 65

Philosophically, Hayek, much as he denies it, is a conservative, in the sense that he believes we must blindly follow traditions even if we can’t defend them.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 67

… to Hayek, the market is an example of a social institution that works better than any individual knows and is needed because of each person’s ignorance.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, pp. 67–68

… we cannot simply continue to regard F.A. Hayek as a good fellow who is against coercion, and against egalitarianism, and favors a reasonable amount of freedom.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 69

Hayek attacks laissez-faire and attacks or ignores the true libertarians … his argument is based on a deprecation or dismissal of both reason and justice …

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 70

Philosophically, Hayek grounds freedom solely on the shaky reed of man’s ignorance.… So concerned is Hayek to oppose rationalism as the threat to liberty, that he abandons any attempt for a rationalist groundwork for liberty.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, pp. 71–72

Hayek’s only principle of noncoercion for government is the “rule of law,” on which he places exclusive reliance.… Hayek is excellent in attacking modern legal philosophers who push the state in a socialistic direction beyond the rule: such as [the legal positivists].… However, Hayek spends virtually equal emphasis on attacking those who would narrow the rule to limit government activity to defense of life, liberty, and property. Hayek attacks this as an “extreme,” unduly narrow, etc., view of the role of government. To Hayek, laissez-faire is almost as bad an outgrowth of “rationalism” as is socialism.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 72

He has no principle for liberty. His only principle is the “rule of law,” and this, weak anyway, is so vitiated and qualified that, by the end, there is virtually no principle remaining.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 75

Hayek favors the following:

• requiring “monopolist” not to discriminate in price among his customers

• government sanitation

• government roads

• compulsory jury service (which he considers “noncoercive”)

• compulsory deputizing of constables …

• government enforcement of religious conformity…

• government enforcement of “rules of conduct” in public places…

• suspension of liberty in “emergencies” (e.g., the right of habeas corpus), in the “public interest”

• the “clear and present danger” invasion of free speech

• government subsidies in the “public interest” (e.g., for “defense”)

• government supplying of a monetary system

• government supplying of standards weights and measures; government supplying of statistics

• government surveying

• government sanitary services

• government health services

• municipal services

• government public works—which individuals would not pay for

• many government enterprises, so long as they are not compulsorily “monopolistic”

• “factory” acts, and other government regulations of production

• interference with absolute private property in land

• failure of government to enforce gambling contracts

• government aid to the indigent, up to a “minimum of subsistence” for everyone; and this “minimum” keeps rising along with the general standard of living(!)

• government subsidies for scientific research, other “experiments”

• municipal government parks

• municipal government museums

• municipal government theaters

• municipal government sports facilities

• outlawing of peaceful secondary strikes and boycotts

• collective bargaining, on work rules…

• collective bargaining on wage differentials…

• outlawing of voluntary closed-shop “yellow-dog” contracts

• compulsory old-age insurance

• compulsory unemployment insurance; town planning by government, to coordinate neighborhoods, etc.

• the right of expropriation of private property by government (right of eminent domain, etc.) …

• governmental building codes, and minimum safety regulation

• compulsory expropriation of land

• federal government parks, and “nature reservations”

• federal government spreading of agricultural knowledge to farmers

• compulsory minimum education for children, with government of course setting the minimum standards

• government aid for education of the poor …

• “academic freedom” and “tenure” in colleges

• government, federal aid to higher education especially of general scientists and scholars

• government special taxation of slum property.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, pp. 75–78

Hayek favors central banking and is opposed to a free-market money.

He is against the return to a gold standard; instead he favors governmental stabilization of the price level, including in such measures a “commodity reserve standard.”

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 77

HAZLITT, HENRY

Henry Hazlitt, a laissez-faire economist but never an isolationist.

Betrayal of the American Right, p. 170

… Bastiat’s broken window fallacy served as the inspiration and centerpiece of Henry Hazlitt’s excellent and best-selling economic primer, Economics in One Lesson.

Classical Economics, p. 472n2

Henry Hazlitt would scrap all constitutional limitations on government to rely solely on the majority will as expressed by the legislature. …

Hazlitt’s reaction to my own brief discussion of the legal norms essential to any free-market economy was a curious one.… It is curious that Hazlitt feels common law to be inferior to arbitrary majority will, and yet to be superior to human reason!

Ethics of Liberty, p. 17n2

… remarkable combination of a brilliant and incisive mind, an unusually clear and lucid style, and an unfailingly cheerful, generous, and gentle soul …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 530

… as an economist, Hazlitt has always been too honest to don the robes of soothsayer and prophet. …

… Henry Hazlitt has been totally outside the modern fashion in battling for many years as an uncompromising adherent of laissez-faire and the free market economy.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 530

… Economics in One Lesson … remains to this day the best introductory primer to economic science. With his usual lucidity, Hazlitt set forth the merits of the free market, and the unfortunate consequences of all the major forms of government intervention, all of which continue to plague us today.

There is still no better introduction to free market economics than Economics in One Lesson. The “lesson” derives from the 19th century libertarian French economist Frédéric Bastiat, who was also distinguished for the clarity of his style: the difference between “what is seen” as a result of government intervention and “what is not seen.”

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 530

… Hazlitt left not a shred standing of Keynes’s famous work.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 531

… Hazlitt argued for a utilitarian ethic and for the morality of free-market capitalism.

… Hazlitt showed that only capitalism can conquer poverty and provide genuine welfare …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 531

… throughout his remarkably productive life, Henry Hazlitt has fought for freedom and a free-market economy with a unique combination of the erudition of a scholar and the lucidity and popular appeal of a lifelong writer and journalist. In a healthier cultural and intellectual climate, he would have honors heaped upon him by scholars and by the general public.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 531

Hazlitt met Mises shortly after his arrival in the United States, and he soon became a close friend and disciple, writing prolifically and creatively on Austrian economics and tirelessly advancing the cause of Mises the person as well as the scholar.

Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, pp. 46–47

… Hazlitt is courageous enough to call a spade a spade.

Strictly Confidential, p. 278

HEALTH CARE

One of the most shameful areas of involuntary servitude in our society is the widespread practice of compulsory commitment, or involuntary hospitalization, of mental patients. …

… involuntary commitment is a profound violation of medical ethics.

For a New Liberty, p. 111

… why are rates high and increasing rapidly? The answer is the very existence of health care insurance, which was established or subsidized or promoted by the government …

Making Economic Sense, p. 74

… our very real medical crisis has been the product of massive government intervention, state and federal, throughout the century; in particular, an artificial boosting of demand coupled with an artificial restriction of supply. The result has been accelerating high prices and deterioration of patient care. And next, socialized medicine could easily bring us to the vaunted medical status of the Soviet Union: everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care.

Making Economic Sense, p. 77

The principle of insurance is that firms or individuals are subject to risks which, in the aggregate, form a class of homogeneous cases.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 553

If there were knowledge about differences between subgroups, and insurance firms charged the same premium rate to all, then this would mean that the healthy or “less risky” groups would be subsidizing the riskier. Unless they specifically desire to grant such subsidies, this result will never be maintained in the competitive free market. In the free market each homogeneous group will tend to pay premium rates in proportion to its actuarial risk, plus a sum for interest income and for necessary costs for the insurance firms.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 554

The increasing conquest of disease has been made possible only by the advance of civilization: by the use of reason, by capitalism, and by the market.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 125

HISTORICISM

… the Historical School was marked by its insistence that there can be no economic laws transcending mere description of the circumstances of individual time and place, and that the only legitimate economics therefore is not theory but a mere examination of history. Politically, this meant that there were no inconvenient economic laws for government to violate, and to cause counterproductive consequences of governmental measures.

Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, p. 33

HISTORY

Looking at facts without the guidance of theory in their selection is virtually impossible.

Classical Economics, p. 120

Facts, of course, must be selected and ordered in accordance with judgments of importance, and such judgments are necessarily tied into the historian’s basic world outlook. My own basic perspective on the history of man, and a fortiori on the history of the United States, is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power …

Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 9; pp. xv–xvi

… I see history as centrally a race and conflict between “social power”—the productive consequence of voluntary interactions among men—and state power. In those eras of history when liberty—social power—has managed to race ahead of state power and control, the country and even mankind have flourished. In those eras when state power has managed to catch up with or surpass social power, mankind suffers and declines.

Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 10; p. xvi

… an historian must bring to bear not only his own discipline but also his knowledge of economics, of political philosophy, and of mankind in general.

Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 11; p. xviii

In contrast to these other disciplines, a work of history does not lose the bulk of its value because of errors in ideology or points of view. An historical work can be extremely valuable despite great differences in basic political or even historical points of view, provided that it focuses on the right questions and that its scholarship is sound. For one thing, such a book can supply the factual data which are the vital stuff of history.

Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 512; p. 502

… history often moves not in a smoothly linear trend but in varying patterns of rises and falls of trends shattered by contrary trends.

Conceived in Liberty v. 2, p. 186; p. 684

… history tries to explain the content of human motives and choices through recorded time.

Economic Controversies, p. 35

… each historical event is the highly complex result of a large number of causal forces, and, further, that it is unique and cannot be considered homogeneous to any other event. Obviously, there are similarities between events, but there is no perfect homogeneity and therefore no room for historical “laws” similar to the exact laws of physical science.

… The economic historian combines all of his scientific knowledge with his understanding of motives and choices to attempt to explain the complex historical phenomenon …

Economic Controversies, p. 40

… history deals with ends adopted in the past, what means were used to try to achieve them—and what the consequences of these actions were.

Economic Controversies, p. 72

The historian’s function is to try to explain the unique historical facts that are his province; to do so adequately he must employ all the relevant theories from all the various disciplines that impinge on his problem. For historical facts are complex resultants of a myriad of causes stemming from different aspects of the human condition. Thus, the historian must be prepared to use not only praxeological economic theory but also insights from physics, psychology, technology, and military strategy along with an interpretive understanding of the motives and goals of individuals. He must employ these tools in understanding both the goals of the various actions of history and the consequences of such actions. Because understanding diverse individuals and their interactions is involved, as well as the historical context, the historian using the tools of natural and social science is in the last analysis an “artist,” and hence there is no guarantee or even likelihood that any two historians will judge a situation in precisely the same way.

Economic Controversies, pp. 77–78

… there are no praxeological laws of historical development … Historical events are complex results of numerous causal factors: praxeologic, psychologic, physical, chemical, biological, etc. The historian must determine which science and its laws apply, and, more difficult, the extent to which each causal factor operated in the events he is attempting to explain or predict. Historians will legitimately differ on the order of importance to be attributed to each factor.

Economic Controversies, p. 116

… to be a good historian you have to be able to use causal theories from various disciplines to help explain unique historical events, and the tools of economic law are indispensable parts of any genuine historian’s armamentarium.

Economic Controversies, p. 176

… history necessarily means narrative, discussion of real persons as well as their abstract theories, and includes triumphs, tragedies, and conflicts, conflicts which are often moral as well as purely theoretical.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. xiii

No scientific truths are ever discovered by inchoate fact-digging. The scientist must first have framed hypotheses; in short, the scientist, before gathering and collating facts, must have a pretty good idea of what to look for, and why.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 292

The development of knowledge in a discipline is not a steady continuous march upward into the light, patiently discarding refuted hypotheses and adding continually to the stock of cumulative knowledge. But rather, the history of the discipline is a zig-zag of great gain and loss, of advances in knowledge followed by decay and false leads, and then by periods of attempts to recapture lost knowledge, trying often dimly and against fierce opposition, to regain paradigms lost.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 502

… human history is basically a race between State power and social power, between the beneficent fruits of peaceful and voluntary production and creativity on the one hand, and the crippling and parasitic blight of State power upon the voluntary and productive social process.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 188

One of the most vital struggles in the writing and publishing of history is the conflict between the government’s propaganda myths, enshrined in “official history,” and historical reality brought forward by “revisionism.”

Left and Right, p. 231

If two historians differ, how can the reader come to a judgment? In basically the same way as when two economists differ, or two philosophers differ: by learning and reading more about the discipline of history and about the concrete areas under discussion.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 380

It is part of the inescapable condition of the historian that he must make estimates and judgments about human motivation even though he cannot ground his judgments in absolute and apodictic certainty.… the good historian cannot escape making a judgment of motivation …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 520

If all States are evil, some are more evil than others, some particular States have engaged in enormously more aggression, both internally against their subjects, and externally against the citizens of other States.… If we libertarians are to understand the real world, and to try to bring about the victory of liberty in that world, we must understand the actual history of concrete, existent States. History provides the indispensable data by which we can understand and deal with our world, and by which we can assess the relative guilt, the relative degrees of aggression committed by the various states.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 639

Revisionism is an historical discipline made necessary by the fact that all States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative burden upon the rest of society. Since its rule is exploitative and parasitic, the State must purchase the alliance of a group of “Court Intellectuals,” whose task is to bamboozle the public into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State. The Court Intellectuals have their work cut out for them. In exchange for their continuing work of apologetics and bamboozlement, the Court Intellectuals win their place as junior partners in the power, prestige, and loot extracted by the State apparatus from the deluded public.

The noble task of Revisionism is to de-bamboozle: to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals, and to present to the public the true history of the motivation, the nature, and the consequences of State activity. By working past the fog of State deception to penetrate to the truth, to the reality behind the false appearances, the Revisionist works to delegitimate, to desanctify, the State in the eyes of the previously deceived public. By doing so, the Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally, performs a vitally important libertarian service. Hence, the Revisionist historian performs crucial libertarian tasks regardless of his own personal ideology. Since the State cannot function, cannot command majority support vital to its existence without imposing a network of deception. Revisionist history becomes a crucial part of the tasks of the libertarian movement. Crucial especially because Revisionism goes beyond pure theory to expose and reveal the specific lies and crimes of the State as it exists in concrete reality.

… Since war and foreign policy provide the State with its easiest means of delusion and deception. Revisionist exposure on the foreign affairs front is the most important avenue of desanctification and delegitimation of the State apparatus and of State aggression.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, pp. 639–40

History usually proceeds at a glacial pace, so glacial that often no institutional or political changes seem to be occurring at all. And then, wham! A piling up of a large number of other minor grievances and tensions reaches a certain point, and there is an explosion of radical social change.

Making Economic Sense, p. 416

History can then be interpreted as a race between social power and State power. In the more abundant periods, e.g., after the Industrial Revolution, social power takes a large spurt ahead of political power, which has not yet had a chance to catch up. The stagnant periods are those in which State power has at last come to extend its control over the newer areas of social power. State power and social power are antithetical, and the former subsists by draining the latter.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1332

… the historian is more than a chronicler; he must also have a command of the significance of events, he must be able to convey to the reader the meaning and interpretation of the past.… the historian must have a “vision” of the meaning, of the significance, of the material he is presenting.

Strictly Confidential, pp. 87–88

The besetting problem among all historians is that they tend, inherently and naturally, to favor the institutions or people whom they choose to study—or, rather, that they choose to study that which they favor.

Strictly Confidential, p. 215

Economic history is almost worthless unless the historian has a knowledge of sound economics as well as of his historical period …

Strictly Confidential, p. 218

The task of the historian or journalist is to capture the essence of the events of the day or of an age, and to select and present his facts accordingly.

Strictly Confidential, p. 386

HOBBES, THOMAS

… the philosophic apologist for monarchical absolutism …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 296

… a statist and a totalitarian …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 22n3

HUME, DAVID

Reason, for Hume and for later utilitarians, is only a hand-maiden, a slave to the passions. There is no room, then, for natural law to establish any ethic for mankind.

Classical Economics, p. 57

Hume … muddied the waters by including in the concept of money virtually all liquid assets, such as bills of exchange and government securities.

Classical Economics, p. 164

Hume’s Treatise was pivotal in its corrosive and destructive skepticism, managing unfairly to discredit the philosophy of natural law, to create an artificial split between fact and value, and therefore to cripple the concept of natural rights on behalf of utilitarianism and indeed to undermine the entire classical realist analysis of cause and effect. There is no figure more important in the unfortunate discrediting of the classical philosophical tradition of natural law realism, a tradition that had lasted from Plato and Aristotle at least through Aquinas and the late scholastics.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 425

David Hume … in a pre-Keynesian fashion, hailed the allegedly vivifying effects of increases in the quantity of money upon prosperity, and called upon the government to make sure that the supply of money is always at least moderately increasing. …

Hume’s inner contradictions on the quantity of money and inflation permeate his meager writings on economics. On the one hand, continuing inflation over the centuries is depicted as bringing about economic growth; on the other, Hume sternly favored ultra-hard money in relation to the banking system. Thus Hume delivered a hard-hitting attack on the unproductive and inflationary nature of the very existence of fractional-reserve banking. …

Hume concluded his penetrating analysis with an ultra-hard money policy proposal—100 percent specie-reserve banking …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 427–28

… Hume had no systematic theory of value, and had no idea whatever of utility as a determinant of value. If anything, he kept stressing that labor was the source of all value.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 430

… David Hume may be considered a free trader and opponent of mercantilism.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 430

… while David Hume knew nothing of utility and spoke of labor as the source of value, he was far sounder on value theory than his close friend Adam Smith.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 451

Hume is generally considered the great debunker of natural law …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 528

… one of the greatest economists of all time …

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 213

David Hume is the philosopher supposed by modern philosophers to have effectively demolished the theory of natural law. Hume’s “demolition” was two-pronged: the raising of the alleged “fact-value” dichotomy, thus debarring the inference of value from fact, and his view that reason is and can only be a slave to the passions. In short, in contrast to the natural-law view that man’s reason can discover the proper ends for man to follow, Hume held that only the emotions can ultimately set man’s ends, and that reason’s place is as the technician and handmaiden to the emotions.… According to this view, people’s emotions are assumed to be primary and unanalyzable givens.

… however, Hume, in the course of his own discussions, was compelled to reintroduce a natural law conception into his social philosophy and particularly into his theory of justice …

… Hume was compelled to write that reason can establish such a social ethic … in short, reason can be superior to the passions.

Ethics of Liberty, pp. 14–15

… a philosophic disaster but quietly benign in social and political matters …

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 284

David Hume, in contrast to his banking-school friend Adam Smith, believed in 100 percent specie reserve banking.

Mystery of Banking, p. 287; Economic Controversies, p. 875

… one of the first economists.

What Has Government Done to Our Money?, p. 24