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Carl Menger and the Foundations of Austrian Economics

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Today is Austrian economist, Carl Menger’s, birthday. Born on February 23, 1840, he died on February 26, 1921, at the age of 81. Menger is most well known as one of the first formulators of the theory of marginal utility, separately though in published form almost simultaneously, with William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras in the early 1870s. But this work also marked the beginning of a uniquely distinct “Austrian School of Economics” based on the theory of subjective value, of which he became viewed as the “founding father.” Menger is also famous for his theory of “spontaneous order” explaining the emergence and development of social and market institutions, especially money, which may be considered an extension of the earlier contributions of the eighteenth century Scottish Moral Philosophers on the same theme. In addition, he was an active participant in the Austrian government’s commission that put Austria-Hungary on the gold standard in the early 1890s, and was a critic of ...

The Follies and Fallacies of Keynesian Economics

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Eighty years ago, on February 4, 1936, one of the most influential books of the last one hundred years was published, British economist, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. With it was born what has become known as Keynesian Economics. Within less than a decade after its appearance, the ideas in The General Theory had practically conquered the economics profession and become a guidebook for government economic policy. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend other people’s money and pander to special interests. In the process Keynes helped undermine what had been three of the essential institutional ingredients of a free-market economy: the gold standard, balanced government budgets, and open competitive markets. In their place Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government ...

What If Obama Believed in Individual Liberty and Free Markets?

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President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union address on January 12, 2016, and devoted most of the time to defending his “legacy” of bigger and more intrusive government, with an emphasis on the other aspects of personal and social life he wished could come under the blanket of more political paternalism, if only there was enough time before he leaves office on January 20, 2017. But suppose that, instead, Obama had had an epiphany shortly before he spoke before the Congress on January 12th. Imagine that he had had a realization that the Progressive and political paternalistic ideas that he has believed in, espoused and implemented during his first seven years in the office of the presidency had been wrong and misguided. What if he had discovered the ideas, say, of Ayn Rand, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, and F. A. Hayek, for example? Suppose that he realized that the true principles of a free society were to ...