Philosophy and Methodology

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. 

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.

I submit that the naïfs who stubbornly refuse to examine the interplay of political and economic interest in government are tossing away an essential tool for analyzing the world in which we live.

A person cannot do right except in a situation where there is also the option of doing wrong.

Rather than look to the state to transform flawed creatures into saints, we should strive to take human beings as they are and direct their energies into productive outlets rather than antisocial outlets.

In earlier days, the government employee was held to be a man who could not have made his way in the business world and was therefore tolerated with condescension.

James Buchanan thought the state was a voluntary institution. Murray Rothbard, on the other hand, understood the reality of state violence and coercion.

Hayek relentlessly scrutinizes and exposes the weak and patchwork structure of Keynes's theoretical arguments and then dismantles it brick by brick, leaving nothing standing.

He is the man who wants alcoholic liquors for any honest purpose whatsoever, who would use his liberty without abusing it, who would occasion no public question, and trouble nobody at all.

Austrian economics begins with universal axioms.