History of the Austrian School of Economics

While searching through my apartment after a tragic fire, under soot and ash, I found these “lost” Rothbard lectures, recorded at NYU in 1979 and 1980.

"Libertarianism" is very much a part of what is now known as "classical" liberalism — the influential free-market ideology of the nineteenth century whose effects and legacy are still felt today.

If Austrian economics seems daunting, just read Hazlitt.

The social, political, and economic conditions of our world today give Ludwig von Mises’s treatise a refreshing relevance matched by few other works written over the last century.

The General Theory is not a book explaining economics to his followers at all, but a propaganda tool to lead them to his vision of a non-Marxist socialist nirvana.

Mises was not one to praise individual economists very often. But he still had his favorites.

Even Marx was forced to admit that workers were not being paid at subsistence levels, and that capitalism led to a rising standard of living for workers. So in order to save his theory, he redefined the concept of subsistence.

The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguished it from precapitalist methods of production is capitalism's efforts to make goods and services available to everyone — not just the wealthy.

Things might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. Without them, it might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny.

Writing about the cultural background of Ludwig von Mises, an eminent former compatriot of mine, poses some difficulties: how to present you with a world radically different from yours, a world far away, which in many ways no longer exists.