Biographies

What causes an economic downturn? The business press keeps getting it painfully wrong, writes Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The famed economist seems never to have met a government intervention he can't justify or a tax cut he can't attack, writes Christopher Westley.

The unhappy truth is that Thomas Jefferson, a great libertarian theorist when out of office, was an outright disaster in power, writes Joseph Stromberg.

Are economic downturns caused by falling demand? No, this is only a symptom of a structural problem, says Frank Shostak.

Earlier last year (February 17) in testimony before the House Banking Committee, Alan Greenspan argued that increases in productivity tend to create greater increases in aggregate demand than in potential aggregate supply. His reasoning was that productivity increases stimulate optimistic corporate earnings forecasts, which stimulate stock price increases, which lead consumers to assume increased personal wealth, which increases consumption (and thus aggregate) expenditure.

The Swiss scholar Eduard Fueter once observed that every historian must decide whether he wishes to write from the perspective of his own time, or from the perspective of those whom he is studying. 

Chris Sciabarra, author of an important new work on freedom's philosophical foundations, explains the impact of the Austrian tradition and his mentor Murray N. Rothbard. 

A brilliant physicist and his musings on the failures of the state.

Despite the many illustrious forerunners in its six-hundred year prehistory, Carl Menger (1840-1921) was the true and sole founder of the Austrian school of economics proper. He merits this title if for no other reason than that he created the system of value and price theory that constitutes the core of Austrian economic theory. But Menger did more than this: he also originated and consistently applied the correct, praxeological method for pursuing theoretical research in economics. Thus in its method and core theory, Austrian economics always was and will forever remain Mengerian economics.

Fetter saw "economics as essentially the study of value, and has viewed all economic phenomena as the concrete expression, under varied circumstances, of one uniform theory of value.