History of the Austrian School of Economics

Man discovered the value of free markets, free competition, and free enterprise. But then the governments man created to "protect" these rights destroyed them instead. 

The uneasiness that impels a man to act is caused by a dissatisfaction with expected future conditions as they would probably develop if nothing were done to alter them.

For a while the postwar ideological climate seemed to be the same as during the war: internationalism, statism, adulation of economic planning and the centralized state, were rampant everywhere.

One must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals.

Like many others, Mises anticipated the outbreak of World War I years in advance. Unlike many others, he dreaded it.

For Hayek, "coercion" of course includes the aggressive use of physical violence, but the term unfortunately also includes peaceful and nonaggressive actions as well.

The field of our science is human action, not the psychological events which result in an action. It is precisely this which distinguishes the general theory of human action, praxeology, from psychology.

In such proposals as let us raise farm prices, let us raise wage rates, let us lower profits, let us curtail the salaries of executives the "us" ultimately refers to the police.

What is the proper sphere of law, property rights, and the state?

The core concepts of contemporary Austrian economics—human action, means and ends, subjective value, marginal analysis, methodological individualism—all flow from Menger's pathbreaking work.