Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics

This is a brief reply to “The Marginal Efficiency of Capital: Rejoinder.”

This short article emphasizes the importance of an institutional framework for environmental mass torts, without which a strict application of libertarian ethics leads to corner solutions in which there is a coordination failure.

This brief note points out that Milton Friedman’s “Plucking Model” has not held following the Great Recession.

The popularity of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (hereafter ABCT) continues to grow in both the popular press and the mainstream of the economics profession.

Garrison has given economists a useful way to illustrate Keynes’s theory, but there are two fundamental problems with Garrison’s interpretation.

ABSTRACT: The circularity problem states that before legal polycentrists can employ price theoretic arguments about market competition, they must first show that legal polycentrism is able to instantiate the institutional framework within which property rights are protected and contracts are enforced. If these requirements are not satisfied, it is illegitimately circular to draw on market competition as an argument for legal polycentrism. This paper indicates that the above problem can be solved by relying on the regression theorem of institutional development, whereby the development of higher-level (hard) institutions is conditioned by the development of lower-level (soft) institutions.

Volume 17, No. 4 (Winter 2014)

Timothy P. Roth

This paper analyzes the period 1867–1879 in American economic history from an "Austrian" perspective.

Book Review by Greg Kaza
Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics

Critics of neoliberalism and its variants including Misesianism have responded to its emergence in two distinct ways: pejoratively,1 or scholarly discourse that seeks to engage neoliberal proponents. The first approach is traceable to the Marxists Kapelush (1925) and Marcuse ([1934] 1968). This low road has been traveled more recently by Krohn (1981), Delong (2009) and Seymour (2010), who, a la Marcuse, smear Mises as pro-fascist when government and private archives show the Austrian worked with U.S. intelligence against Italian fascism and German Nazism in the World War II era.

ABSTRACT: Juan de Mariana may have had more direct lines of influence on the contemporary political denunciation of central banking in the United States than previously thought. As the culmination of a series of monetary theorists of the School of Salamanca, Mariana’s genius was his ability to synthesize and articulate a critique of the inflationary monetary policies of the Spanish Habsburgs. Furthermore, the Jesuit scholar linked his economic analysis to his equally scandalous endorsement of regicide. For their part, both the monetary policy concerns and the rebellious animus of the modern libertarian wing of American politics echo Thomas Jefferson’s views during the early Republic. These views also likely owe something to Mariana’s uniquely menacing confrontations with the Habsburgs. And thanks to the Virginian’s lifelong appreciation of Miguel de Cervantes’s great novel Don Quijote, which was itself heavily influenced by Mariana, the fascinating connections between Jefferson’s and Mariana’s politicized understandings of money are even further intertwined.