The Free Market 26, no. 1 (January 2008) Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” begins: This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls. Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. The
The Free Market 26, no. 11 (December 2008) We are now hearing ominous warnings about imminent deflation. Checking the welcome page at AOL this morning, I see that the lead item in the financial news section heralds “The Looming Threat of Deflation.” This headline encapsulates two highly problematic ideas. The first is that deflation would
The Free Market 31, no. 8 (August 2013) For thousands of years, philosophers have argued that society must invest great power in the rulers because only great power can hold back the forces of evil—violence, plunder, and disorder. They have often conceded, however, that this solution has a down side: powerful rulers may themselves resort to
Volume 1, No. 1 (Spring 1998) This volume of F.A. Hayek’s collected works brings together chapters, articles, and reviews Hayek wrote between 1935 and 1949. The volume’s editor, Bruce Caldwell, has divided the contents into three parts: market socialism and the socialist calculation debate; the economics and politics of war; and planning,
Volume 3, No. 4 (Winter 2000) Butler Shaffer’s well-written monograph, In Restraint of Trade , describes in extensive detail why and how most businessmen pleaded for the government to tame them between the end of World War I and the eve of World War II. Other scholars have plowed this field before; most notably John T. Flynn (to whose memory
Many years after the Great Depression and World War II, controversy continues to swirl as scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens look back at the watershed events of the 1930s and 1940s. Economists and economic historians have assessed the economy’s condition during these momentous years primarily with reference to the usual macroeconomic
The world probably would have been much better off had macroeconomics never been devised. Although I have in mind Keynesian macroeconomics above all, I include other types of macro models as well. I even include, somewhat reluctantly, the whole quantity theory approach descended from David Hume to the Friedmanites, now known as monetarism. One of
In his justly famous 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , Joseph A. Schumpeter described the dynamics of a market economy as a process of “creative destruction.” In his view, innovation—“the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist
Robert Fogel died a few days ago. He was a prominent figure in the academic economic history profession for five decades, virtually from the time he burst onto the scene with the publication of a polished-up version of his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. dissertation, Railroads and American Economic Growth , in 1964. This book was the most impressive
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
