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Monetary Policy and the Present Trend toward All-around Planning The people of all countries agree that the present state of monetary affairs is unsatisfactory and that a change is highly desirable. However, ideas about the kind of reform needed and about the goal to be aimed at differ widely. There is some confused talk about stability and about

[ A selection from ”The Objectives of Economic Education” in  Economic Freedom and Interventionism .]  The struggle between the two systems of social organization, freedom and totalitarianism, will be decided in the democratic nations at the polls. As things are today, the outcome in the United States will determine the outcome for all other

In the Age of Enlightenment, in the years in which the North Americans founded their independence, and a few years later, when the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were transformed into independent nations, the prevailing mood in Western civilization was optimistic. At that time all philosophers and statesmen were fully convinced that we were

[This essay is a selection from lecture 7 in  Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction .] The banks very often expand credit for political reasons. There is an old saying that if prices are rising, if business is booming, the party in power has a better chance to succeed in an election campaign than it would otherwise. Thus the decision to

The preeminence of the capitalist system consists in the fact that it is the only system of social cooperation and division of labor which makes it possible to apply a method of reckoning and computation in planning new projects and appraising the usefulness of the operation of those plants, farms, and workshops already working. The

A Selection from  The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics . 1. The Beginnings What is known as the Austrian School of Economics started in 1871 when Carl Menger published a slender volume under the title  Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre . It is customary to trace the influence that the milieu exerted upon the achievements

1. The German Rejection of Classical Economics The hostility that the teachings of Classical economic theory encountered on the European continent was primarily caused by political prepossessions. Political economy as developed by several generations of English thinkers, brilliantly expounded by Hume and Adam Smith and perfected by Ricardo, was

1. The “Austrian School” and Austria When the German professors attached the epithet “Austrian” to the theories of Menger and his two earliest followers and continuators, they meant it in a pejorative sense. After the battle of Königgrätz, the qualification of a thing as Austrian always had such a coloration in Berlin, that “headquarters of  Geist

[Excerpted from chapter 16 of Theory and History (1957).] A realistic philosophical interpretation of history must abstain from any reference to the chimerical notion of a perfect state of human affairs. The only basis from which a realistic interpretation can start is the fact that man, like all other living beings, is driven by the impulse to

[Excerpted from chapter 16 of Theory and History (1957).] A civilization is the product of a definite worldview, and its philosophy manifests itself in each of its accomplishments. The artifacts produced by men may be called material. But the methods resorted to in the arrangement of production activities are mental, the outcome of ideas that