History of the Austrian School of Economics

Our talks today were in the Chapter room where Francisco Vitoria taught and the professors of the 15th and 16th centuries gave papers for each other before their public presentations at the university.

"The basic principles of the theory of the competitive market were worked out by the Spanish scholastics of the 16th century..."

"Without the historical act of saving, which is now embodied in capital goods, there would be no economy at all."

Fiat money takes this power out of his hands. The consequence is a greater tendency for capital to be wasted.

"The consumer and his valuations lies at the root of all economic considerations."

Modern monetary theory takes up the thread of the traditional quantity theory as far as it starts from the cognition that changes in the purchasing power of money must be dealt with according to the principles applied to all other market phenomena and that there exists a connection between the changes in the demand for and supply of money on the one hand and those of purchasing power on the other.

"[I]f the glorious public sector, if expanded government, has brought us to this pretty pass, perhaps the answer is to roll government back, to return to the truly revolutionary path of dismantling the Big State."

The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it makes the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the arbitrary and vacillating policies of governments, political parties, and pressure groups.

Rothbard is even more consistent and rigorous than I had imagined.

The point, once more, is not that the conservatives deployed bad arguments against the supposed extremism of Mises and Rothbard. Rather, they downgraded the role of reason as such; and this rendered ineffective their resistance to the Left.