Spoken Mises

Plato's Republic purports to deal with the nature and conditions of a just republic, as well as with the perversions of justice in man and society. However, Guido Hulsman writes that its discussion of these normative topics is squarely built upon a positive theory of the origin and nature of society. And at the heart of this theory, as we shall see, is a sophisticated account of the division of labor. The theory of the division of labor is one of the cornerstones of economics. It is the very foundation of the scientific analysis of society and the market.

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How Society Works: Plato's Contribution (2.03 MB)

During the Panic of 1819, writes Sean Corrigan, the well-known American author, Washington Irving (of "Sleepy Hollow" fame), was enjoying a prolonged trip to Europe. During his sojourn there, he turned his hand to a treatment of that earlier moral fable of financial hubris and nemesis, the Mississippi Bubble. So vivid is the description of the background to the folly — and so utterly unchanging is the course of the pathology there laid out — that an extended quote, taken from the collection of essays entitled "The Crayon Papers," is surely merited for our instruction

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Washington Irving: Critic of Loose Money (2.71 MB)

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. asks: Why are Republicans so bad? There are interesting class-based reasons, but the core problem is philosophical. Their meta-understanding of politics bypassed the liberal revolution of the 18th century and embraced the anti-liberal elements of the Enlightenment. Up with Hobbes, down with Locke: that is their implied creed. Liberty is fine but order, ORDER, is much more important, and order comes from the state. They can't even fathom the truth that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. That thought is too complex for the Manichean mind.

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The Republicans and their Doomed Ideology (1.63 MB)

Any one who wants to truly understand the sociology of production must go and search for what William Graham Sumner called the Forgotten Man. He will be found to be worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting. He is not, technically, "poor" or "weak"; he minds his own business, and makes no complaint. Consequently the philanthropists never think of him, and trample on him. The industrious and sober workman, who is mulcted of a percentage of his day's wages to pay the policeman, is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the Forgotten Man. He passes by and is never noticed, because he has behaved himself, fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing.

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The Forgotten Man (2.36 MB)

J.G. Hulsmann writes on Pascal Salin, the author of eleven books, dozens of scholarly papers, and hundreds of articles in which he explains and develops economic science and courageously advocates individual liberty. Throughout his career, he has earned great distinctions and gained enthusiastic followers, not least of all because his patent intellectual prowess combines with the elegant civility of a gentleman of the old French school. On the occasion of his approaching retirement, colleagues, friends, former students, and admirers from all over the world have just published a festschrift in his honor.

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Pascal Salin: Gentleman, Economist, Radical (1.86 MB)

The Austrians' great concern, writes Thorsten Polleit, is that a government-dominated money-supply regime would ultimately lead to economic and therefore political disaster; the objective of price stability would not alter such a dismal prediction. Even if a central bank succeeds in stabilizing a targeted price index, it would — by an ideologically motivated increase in credit and money supply — generously increase credit and money supply. It thereby distorts the economy's price mechanism, promotes malinvestment and initiates subsequent economic downturns. And it is actually the latter with which the trouble really starts.

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The Fateful Wish for Price Stability (2.63 MB)

In 1933, Henry Hazlitt left The Nation magazine to become Mencken's successor at the American Mercury. During the transition, he wrote an important but lost book on literary criticism that will be of intense interest to economists and literature scholars. His appendix is particularly compelling, for here he blasts the rise of a new breed of critic, one who sees all literature through Marxian eyes. Hazlitt wrote long before this strain of thought became dominant in the profession.

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Literature and the "Class War" (4.23 MB)

Robert Higgs' idea of a great president is one who acts in accordance with his oath of office to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Not since the presidency of Grover Cleveland has any president achieved greatness by this standard. Worse, the most admired have been those who failed most miserably. Evidently Higgs' standard differs from that employed by others who judge presidential greatness.

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No More Great Presidents (1.85 MB)

The purpose of this article, wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1937, is to state a proposition which underlies the modern "monetary over-investment theories" of the trade cycle in a form in which, as far as I know, it has never before been expressed but which seems to make this particular proposition so obvious as to put its logical correctness beyond dispute. It should, moreover, clear up some of the confusion and misunderstandings which have made it so difficult to come to an agreement on the purely analytical points involved. It will surprise nobody to find the source of this confusion in the ambiguity of the term capital.

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Investment that Raises the Demand for Capital (2.78 MB)

Although Austro-libertarians have always been staunch supporters of free trade, Robert Murphy writes that many are worried over the unusually large current account deficits of recent decades. Even though they concede that a truly free market trade deficit would be perfectly benign, they believe that the current "global imbalances" in trade patterns largely reflect the behavior of central bankers, rather than voluntary exchanges between private individuals across the planet. Are they right?

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Trade Deficits and Fiat Currencies (2.28 MB)