This is the famous speech by Murray Rothbard given in the days following the collapse of the Soviet empire. His exuberance is palpable has he explains the meaning of it all for the place of liberty in the history of civilization. A brilliant scholar and passionate defender of Liberty, Professor Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) was dean of the Austrian School of economics, holder of the SJ Hall Chair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Academic Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The author of 17 books and thousands of articles, the foremost Misesian economist, the father of modern freedom theory, and the most delightful personality in the profession, this great teacher here spellbinds an audience of students, faculty, and business leaders in the “Future of Austrian Economics,” at the 1990 Mises University at Stanford. Only Austrian economics, Rothbard shows, can explain the collapse of socialism/communism and tell us what should replace it: laissez-faire capitalism. There is a lesson here as well, he shows, for dealing with the Leviathan in Washington, DC
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Anyone ever heard of Commercial redemption? How about humans as sovereign lord and king over their person!
Almost every eminent intellectual of Austrian economics lived into their 80s and 90s. Like my theory on health goes, “A sound mind, a sound body.” You can draw your own conclusions.
WHERE ARE THE FUCKING RATING STARS?
Erm, Walras’ law*
lol, I might mention that Keynes “refutation” of Say’s Law amounts to little more than a straw man refutation of Walrus’ Law, nevermind “at length” means Keynes’ grand total of four pages dealing with his argument.
“building throughout the 1920′s, on its own without government interference” Actually that is not true. Look on the Fed website. They got a new tool to expand credit in 1923.
As the interest rate rises after the bust that creditexpansion must bring, it encourages less roundabout production for which there are not enough resources and more immediate production-if you do not believe in a natural interest rate rather than artificial central banking interest rates then you are not an economist, but a 17th century Mercantilist, puzzled at the crisis the state has brought about and labelling it the result of too little spending, too little money, and a general glut.Fuckoff
Nonsense. Like I said, I don’t have the time or the space to detail why this is all so wrong headed, but seriously, if you ever want to learn, read the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Thats it. Causa Finita.
And to make you realise how why the theory is wrong: look at the practicalities: forcing people to spend on malinvested, unsustainable ventures? Blaming UNDER(!)consumption? Expanding credit by pushing rates low to diminish liquidity preference? It’s all a stack of bullshit, pyramided to form a feeble defence of neomercantilism. Giving people more fiat money to run unsustainable ventures is what MAKES THE BOOM, i.e. the period in which malinvestments do not clear, after being created by the Fed.
Wow, that’s how you refute someone! I’ve been schooled…no.
The General Theory was a book written to make credible the notion of Liqudity Traps. Without this absolute fallacy, the whole notion of govt needing to replace fallen market demand with its own borrowing is nonsense: it has to be proven that the market needs this intervention not aiming directly at profitability but at increasing consumption. The theory ignores that saving goes TOWARDS consumption, it’s therefore BS. That’s it. End of
Its becoming increasingly evident that you have not in fact read the General Theory. If you had, you would have read the beginning of the book where this is all addressed at length. I don’t have time to explain the whole damn book here, just read it and see.
Yes, we can retain resources and create work, if those resources are invested. Why is this so difficult: effective demand consists of both consumption AND investment, that is to say income saved and income spent, if the saved income is invested. Why you ignore Keynes’ emphasis on investment is not understandable, its probably because it flys in the face of your beliefs.
Oh and by the way, Keynes was too thick to even grasp Say’s Law; that as the producer supplies a good to the market, i.e. to exchange it for other capital, he imputes his demand with his supply of a good: production creates demand, for without production there is nothing to want and without production nobody can bring anything to exchange in order to gain goods they want more than what they’ve produced, i.e. in order to fulfil their personal demand.
Keynes=Fail
And if I was wrong about this, the economy couldn’t grow because we would only work to renew what we have consumed: i.e. no net productivity would occur. This is reductio ad absurdum: a legitimate device for exposing fallacies in erroneous cause-effect correlations.
It is ‘the mark of a bad economist’ to think that employment will be low due to low demand and consumption; as if people aren’t driven by saving to be able to consume more! As if the business cycle occurs through !UNDER!consumption!
I’m getting tired of this. I know that Keynes erroneously thought, as pre-Adam Smith economists once did, and as Malthus once pondered, that excessive refraining from purchase does not facilitate employment. This is incorrect. Yes, if capital goods are consumed, by war, we will be put to work with veracity to renew them. But no, wanton consumption in of itself does not create jobs: exchange creates jobs, which is partly consumption, partly investment: we can retain resources and still work.
Your confusion is stemming from the fact that you do not in fact understand what Keynes wrote. Keynes did not say that consumption was all that drove income and that people should not save, what he said was that as incomes grew, people spent and saved more, but tended to increase savings more than they increased spending. If that increase in saving was not translated into and equal amount of investment, effective demand would be insufficient to maintain full employment.
Yes it is me, and I’m here to make you my bitch, like all the other good economists who rip your ignorant bullshit to shreds.
LOL at your historianship, Hoover did not pursue a laissez-faire policy but was more or less what might later have been called a moderate New Dealer. Hoover was ideologically opposed to an economy free from government steering, then again, so were the so-called economists of the time like Fisher and Keynes. Liquidation of malinvestment was PREVENTED from occurring!
I must disagree with qerplonk-your grasp of history is possibly worse than your grasp of economics, Austrian or otherwise.
In that, if the US government had allowed economic freedom from coercive tax and spend, the people would have liquidated that which was unsustainable, called into being by the 20s credit expansion and subsistent only on further inflation: this is what we call malinvestment: using force to stop it clearing is forcing another boom, another stagnant, debt driven consumeconomy
Not you again.
@hoodoo
Try again. Deflation, if it means anything rather than a vague term referring to appreciation of money, should technically refer to decrease in the supply of money. I know that it is in effect a FORCE, destroying credit and reducing the velocity of money, but we must be scientific if we are to treat it at all as an object, a mass.
This may be necessary to stop the misleading of investment incurred by credit-expansion. Deflation aids liquidation, allows non-debt-driven growth.Sent U a PM
@hoodoo961 Just a friendly suggestion. Read Austrian texts before you promote the welfare state on this page. Seriously, someone could be hospitalized because of laughing too hard.
@hoodoo961 I think I know where that argument is coming from. Your concept of deflation is what happens when a bubble bursts and your right in the effects of which. Deflation cleanses out the system. What I’m talking about is deflation due to increased productivity which increases money’s purchasing power and leads to higher living standards.
Deflation reduces employment because it reduces demand for goods and services, and reduces the value of non monetary assets. When entrepreneurs cannot get the same amount of money for their product, they must slash employment, leading to unemployment. Deflation=unemployment.
@hoodoo961 Yes, more labor will be bought and that reduces unemployment.
Welfare, foodstamps, public sanitation? Lol. Your not serious are you?
In famous book “The Great Transformation” Karl Polanyi’s central thesis is that capitalism is a historical anomaly because while previous economic arrangments were embedded in social relations,in capitalism,the situations was reversed -social relations were defined by economic relations.Polanyi’s view,in the sweep of human history,rules of reciprocity,redistribution and communal obligations were far more frequent than market relations.completely replace all modes of interaction with the other