We received the following at our offices:

Dear Mr. Rockwell and the Staff, Senior Faculty and Adjunct Scholars of the Ludwig von Mises Institute,

I have been asked by the Conservative Leadership Association (CLA) and the College Libertarians (CLs) of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri to express our gratitude for the tremendous support and resources you have provided for our efforts on the Wash. U. campus.

First and foremost, our excellent speaker events have been dominated by scholars associated with the Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com or Antiwar.com.  The following list of the associated speakers we've had in the past few years (I apologize if I missed anyone) demonstrates this:

• Walter Block 
• Paul Cantor 
• Thomas DiLorenzo 
• Humberto Fontova 
• Paul Gottfried 
• Robert Higgs 
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe 
• Donald Livingston 
• Roderick Long 
• Justin Raimondo

These speakers have been well prepared, thought provoking and inspiring. In the face of often hostile audiences, they have maintained a calm, scholarly tone and dealt with audience questions respectfully.  In discussing tonight what were highlights for CLA members from this past year, many mentioned the speaker events.  Several mentioned the extra time to interact with these scholars at meals and in smaller seminars just with our group members.
    
Additionally, many of the members of the CLA and the CLs have attended Mises Institute events like the Austrian Scholars Conferences.  Again, the approachability of the scholars at these events has had a real impact on many of the students.  I have, again and again, observed the excitement of students returning from these events.  It would not be exaggerating to say that these events are electric for many of the students. 

Finally, the influence of the Mises Institute can be seen on our conservative student paper, the Washington Witness.  (We publish bi-weekly during the school year.  Our most recent issue was a 24 page "War and Foreign Policy" symposium).  In addition to interviews with the speakers, it is not uncommon to see Mises, Rothbard and many other Mises Institute scholars quoted in these pages.  Through the Witness, these ideas are readily available at the Wash. U. campus.

As a personal note, I would just add that the members of the CLA and CLs are an unusually bright, organized and motivated group of college students. Next time you see a group of Wash. U. students at a Mises Institute event, I encourage you to take the time to get to know some of them.

We are grateful for all that has gone into making the Mises Institute the great resource it is and to the extraordinary group of scholars that have gathered around the Institute.  We look forward to an ongoing fruitful relationship with the Institute and to inviting many more of the scholars to come to speak at our University.

Thanks again,
 Stephen W. Carson
on behalf of the Conservative Leadership Association and the College Libertarians at Washington University in St. Louis

"The characteristic feature of this age of destructive wars and social disintegration is the revolt against economics." So says Ludwig von Mises in his most thorough defense of the method and scope of economic science. In this treatise, he argues that the core intellectual errors of statism, socialism, protectionism, racism, irrationalism can be found in a revolt against economic logic and its special character.

Epistemological Problems of Economics was original published in 1933, a period when the social sciences and economic policy were undergoing upheaval. The classical view of economics as a deductive science, along with the laissez-faire policies implied by that view, were being displaced by positivism and economic planning. Mises set out to put the classical view on a firmer foundation. In so doing, he examines a range of philosophical problems associated with economics. He goes further to delineate the scope of the general science of human action. 

This treatise, out of print for many years, is now brought back by the Mises Institute in a 3rd edition, with a comprehensive introduction by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He observes that "the great majority of contemporary economists, sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers are either completely unaware of Mises's contributions to the epistemology of the social sciences or think they can safely neglect dealing with them. They are in error. One can ignore a thinker, but the fundamental problems of social analysis remain. There will be no progress in these disciplines before the mainstream has fully absorbed and digested Mises's ideas." 

Hardback, 341 pp including introduction, foreword, prefaces, and index.  PURCHASE THE BOOK.

Read the introduction.

Mises Institute president Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., made a special appearance on the Bill Moyers show. That transcript is now available. You can also watch the entire show from this link on the Mises Institute server: http://www.mises.org/video/Now.wmv.

* * * * *

http://www.yale.edu/ypunion/home.htm

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Professor of Economics, University of Nevada at Las Vegas

March 5, 7:30 PM, Room To Be Announced 

Resolved, Down with the State and Democracy in Particular

Professor Hoppe was born on September 2, 1949, in Peine, West Germany. He attended the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt/M, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for studies in Philosophy, Sociology, History, and Economics. He earned his Ph.D. (Philosophy, 1974) and his “Habilitation” (Sociology and Economics, 1981), both from the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. 

He taught at several German universities as well as at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center for Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy. In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States, to study under Murray Rothbard. He remained a close associate of Rothbard until his death in January, 1995. 

An Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher, he is currently Professor of Economics at UNLV, Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. 

In addition to his recent English-language books, Professor Hoppe is the author of Handeln und Erkennen (Bern 1976); Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (Opladen 1983); Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat (Opladen 1987) and numerous articles on philosophy, economics and the social sciences.

Three Seminars on Hayekian Macroeconomic Thought
by Roger W. Garrison

Professor of Economics, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama USA
Adjunct Scholar, The Ludwig von Mises Institute
Hayek Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (May/June 2003)
Author of Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (London: Routledge, 2001)

Roger W. Garrison will conduct a three-part lecture series on Austrian business cycle theory at the London School of Economics, May 27, June 3, and June 10, 2003. In addition, he will deliver the F.A. Hayek Memorial Lecture, June 5, 2003, 6:00pm in the Old Theatre of the London School of Economics. The public is welcome and encouraged to the public lecture. The lecture series is for the LSE community and by invitation only. [Download poster for public event]

The lecture series is named in honor of Friedrich August von Hayek. Hayek has been one of the most influential social philosophers of the twentieth century. His early interests as an economist centered on developing a synthesis of the Austrian School theory of the business cycle developed by Ludwig von Mises, and the Lausanne School theory of general equilibrium. This resulted in the Prices and Production lecture series, earned Hayek a chair at LSE, and led to the famous Cambridge (Keynes) versus  The LSE (Hayek / Robbins) debates. Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974, a direct result of this LSE work.

Hayek held his chair at LSE from 1931 to 1950, during which time he pioneered the economic analysis of the role that information plays in co-ordinating the division of labor. He later generalized these discoveries and developed a general social theory stressing the importance of "spontaneous" orders and institutions, such as those which characterize a market economy. In 1947, Hayek founded the neo-liberal Mont Pelerin Society, through which he would have great personal and intellectual influence on virtually all post-war liberal & conservative movements.

Roger W. Garrison received his PhD from the University of Virginia. He is a professor of economics at Auburn University. Garrison has continued on from where Hayek and Robbins left off before World War Two, before Keynesian hegemony took hold. Garrison has thoroughly reformulated the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle to address the short comings of present day Keynesian, Neo-Keynesian, Monetarist and Rational-Expectations explanations of the current day business cycle. In 2001, he published Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (Routledge).

Overview
 
By the close of the twentieth century, macroeconomics had developed in two directions that can justifiably be dubbed "the macroeconomics of perversity" and "the macroeconomics of perfection."  "Perversity" characterizes those theories in which market "failure" in the forms of economy-wide unemployment or wage and price inflation is built into the very framework of analysis. "Perfection" characterizes those theories in which expectations are always "rational" and markets are always "efficient." The former mode of theorizing, rooted in the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, denies even the possibility of a market solution to macroeconomic problems; the latter mode of theorizing, stemming from the ideas of Robert Lucas and other new classical economists, denies the very existence of the problems themselves.

Progress in the field of macroeconomics would seem to require an analytical framework that entails neither inherent perversity nor assumed perfection. Just such a theory can be constructed from the long-neglected ideas of the Austrian school of economics, a school that flourished at the London School of Economics in the 1930s under the leadership of F.A. Hayek. Austrian macroeconomics, or more descriptively, capital-based macroeconomics allows for the possibility that markets will work right but identifies circumstances under which markets can go wrong.

It is increasingly recognized that the weakness in modern macroeconomic theorizing is the lack of any "real coupling" (Robert Solow's term) of short-run and long-run aspects of the market process. In the short run, the investment and consumption magnitudes move in the same direction, either both downward into recession or both upward toward full employment and even beyond in an inflationary spiral. But for a given period and with a given technology, any change in the economy's long-run growth rate must entail consumption and investment magnitudes that move, initially, in opposition to one another.

Modern Austrian macroeconomics, which builds on the early writings of Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek, can be comprehended as an effort to reinstate the capital-theory core that allows for a healthy real coupling of short-run and long-run perspectives. Although the macroeconomic relationships emphasized by the Austrians are largely complementary to the relationships that have dominated the thinking of macroeconomists for the past half century, capital-based macroeconomics presents a fundamental challenge to modern theorists and practitioners who overdraw the short-run/long-run distinction.

The arguments developed at the LSE in the 1930s suggest that the troubles characterizing modern capital-intensive economies, particularly the episodes of boom and bust, may best be analyzed with the aid of a capital-based macroeconomics.

----->more information and details.

New items are constantly being added to the Austrian Study Guide, in order to make this your one-stop research tool for all great Austrian texts and citations:

• Hans F. Sennholz. The Underground Economy (Auburn, AL: The Mises Institute, 1982)
• Murray N. Rothbard, "Keynes, the Man" Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics, Edited by Mark Skousen. (New York: Praeger (1992). Pp. 171–198). 
• Ludwig von Mises. Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, 1984. [1969, Arlington House])

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Mises.org sent out its first daily article in July 1998, and today 8,657 people subscribe to receive commentary from the perspective of the Austrian School in their in-boxes every day. In addition, the articles are sent around, linked, and entered into Google's search engine to be a permanent part of the public-affairs culture.

Last week's traffic alone yielded 137,385 sessions on Mises.org, with a monthly total of half a million (with 14.5 million hits). The authors of articles value the correspondence they receive, and readers tell us that they find the service is indispensable. 

If you are not subscribed, go to Mises Institute email services and sign up. There is no charge. 

There are many conferences and activities coming up. 

• Downturn: The Causes and Consequences. Seminar directed by Frank Shostak, February 14, 2003, Mises Institute (not limited to students, no charge, but please RSVP) 
• Austrian Scholars Conference 9, March 13-15, 2003 (see site for fees)  
• Rothbard Graduate Seminar 2003 (text under discussion is Man, Economy, and State by Murray N. Rothbard), June 2-7, 2003, Mises Institute (accepted students and faculty only)  
• History: The Struggle for Liberty, A Seminar with Ralph Raico, June 16-20, 2003, Mises Institute (not limited to students, no charge, but applications required)  
• Crisis and Liberty: The Expansion of Government Power in American History, A Seminar with Robert Higgs, June 23-27, 2003, Mises Institute (not limited to students, no charge, but applications required)  
• Mises University 18, August 3-9, 2003, Mises Institute (accepted students and faculty)

It's time for students to make summer plans. You might want to consider a summer at the Mises Institute. You will develop an expertise in a field that would not otherwise be cultivated in a classroom setting, read literature otherwise unavailable, and take advantage of a window of opportunity for serious investigation and reflection. During the typical academic career, such opportunities are extremely rare.

 Mises.org has made some spectacular new additions to its Study Guide. Note especially the Frederick L. Maier Archive on the Political Economy of Taxation, which includes a complete online edition of A Tariff History of the United States by Frank Taussig. There are many surprises in the Study Guide, including many texts by Austrians online for the first time. 

There are new working papers, articles from the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, new issues of the Free Market and the Austrian Economics Newsletter, as well as new reviews in the Mises Review. 

Finally, the new Freedom Calendar for 2003 is available in text, landscape, and portrait formats. Print out a copy and keep up with important events in the history of freedom and the work of the Mises Institute.

• What Child is This?    
• Bring the Torch, Jeannette, Isabella      
• Appalachian Christmas Carol (I Wonder as I Wander)    
• Silent Night    
• The First Noel    
• Angels We Have Heard on High    
• Away in a Manger    
• What Child is This?   
• Hark! The Herald Angels Sing    
• God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen    
• O Come, All Ye Faithful    
• Christmas Joy    
• What Child is This?    
• Cradle Songs    
• Manger Lullabies    
• In the Bleak Midwinter

Two Mises Institute books received top billing in the December 2, 2002, issue of Barron's. Gene Epstein, writing in his popular "Economic Beat" column, recommends only three books this year, two of which are Mises Institute works in economic theory and history.

First, there is Gene Callahan's Economics for Real People, published just this year, which Epstein calls "a terrific new book on economic theory." "If I were teaching an introductory course in economics," writes Epstein, "I'd assign Gene Callahan's Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School. I also commend it to folks in search of a good read on the joys of economic insight."

He continues:

"Callahan's reference to 'real people' consciously echoes the more austere title of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises' magnum opus, Human Action. For as the author explains, economics is the study of how real people act to relieve dissatisfaction. For example, dissatisfied with the inconvenience of barter, folks start using more marketable goods for indirect exchange, a practice that eventually results in one or two commodities becoming the preferred medium of exchange, usually gold or silver….

"The first half of the book sets forth basic principles; the second shows how the myriad ways of interfering with the market make matters worse, sometimes much worse. Callahan cites the 'health-care crisis' as a prime example of how 'the problems resulting from one intervention tend to lead to calls for other interventions to fix those problems.' While the hated HMOs are generally viewed as creatures of capitalism, these 'strange entities' are just a response to the soaring costs arising from the government-instituted system of third party payments.

"'We do not see AMOs in the automobile industry or CMOs in the computer business,' observes Callahan. That insight cuts to the core of what is really going on. Auto dealers might also find their professional live unbearable, just as many physicians do, if AMOs told them how to service their customers. But happily, the disease of third party payments has only infected health care.

"On the issue of government subsidizing business to build things, the author quotes from a review by Newt Gingrich of a book about the transcontinental railroad, in which the former congressman celebrates the 'public-private partnership' without which 'the railroad could not have been built for another generation.' To which Callahan responds, 'Gingrich simply assumes that a transcontinental railroad ought to have come before the alternatives that entrepreneurs might have created with those same resources.'

* * * *

The second book on the list is Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln. Epstein writes:

"More than 16,000 books have already been written about Abraham Lincoln. But it took an economist to get the story right. The Real Lincoln, by Loyola College economics prof Thomas J. DiLorenzo, is this year's top pick in my sixth annual review of Holiday Gifts that Keep on Giving, When It's the Thought that Counts….

"I personally revere Lincoln as a great writer (I've read the Second Inaugural so often, I can recite long passages from memory). But the short and riveting book, "The Real Lincoln," made me actively dislike him as a politician.

"Other historians before DiLorenzo have already shown the Great Emancipator was never very interested in abolishing slavery. What The Real Lincoln adds to the story is that he did work tirelessly for a cause. Inspired by his hero and mentor, Whig Party leader Henry Clay, Lincoln believed that the way to promote the common good was through a strong centralized government that maintained high tariff barriers, controlled the nation's money supply, and subsidized corporations engaged in "internal improvement" projects like the building of the transcontinental railroad.

"So it was hardly surprising that Lincoln's devotion to the ideal of 'Union,' a word he always began with a capital letter, was the only reason he ever cited for his decision to oppose by force the southern states' attempt to secede. 'My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union,' he wrote in 1862, 'and ... if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.'

"DiLorenzo suggests that the key reason the southern states seceded was to get out from under the very same economic policies Lincoln stood for, which had been hurting their own economies for decades. The tariffs already in place protected northern industries, not southern. So as importer of these products, the South paid the tariff either directly, if it bought the products from abroad, or indirectly if purchased them from the North.

"Lincoln's own justification for tariffs was an odd variation of the worthless-middleman myth. In his view, allowing imports into the country made things more expensive because so much was wasted on the "useless labor" of transporting the goods from abroad. To which DiLorenzo makes the obvious point that by this logic, Lincoln should have advised Chicago about all the useless labor that could be saved by prohibiting imports from Springfield.

"Had this bookish politician known the laws of supply and demand -- hardly a secret since the 1776 publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations -- he would have realized that when goods are more plentiful, their price is lower, not higher, no matter how costly it might have been to bring them to market. On the other hand, if shipping costs run higher than the amount buyers are willing to pay for the goods, importing will be unprofitable, in which case you won't need a tariff to prevent if from happening.

"DiLorenzo grants that the abolition of slavery was 'the one unequivocal good that came of Lincoln's war.' But on Lincoln's watch, the U.S. became virtually the only nation in the world that could not end slavery peacefully. Here DiLorenzo argues a counterfactual that I find convincing. Dozens of countries, including the British Empire, had already ended slavery through 'compensated emancipation' -- buying them back from the slaveholders. With all his legendary political skills, and with just a portion of the money he spent on waging the most destructive war in history up to that time, Lincoln could have done the same."

Buy Economics for Real People by Callahan and The Real Lincoln by DiLorenzo. Also, browse through all the offerings in the new Mises Institute online catalog.

The Mises Institute is very pleased to announce the publication of a new work by Murray N. Rothbard: A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute 2002). This is not some lifeless statistical account of the money supply rising and falling. Rothbard explains banking history as only he can, as an exciting chronicle of glorious enterprise combined with brazen swindles backed by the state, and leading to economic calamities of all sorts.

The current generation of Americans know the business cycle all too well: inflated prices in the financial sector and overbuilt capital goods, followed by a collapse in prices, capital-goods liquidation, and the onset economic doldrums. The cycle has been repeated many times in American history, and the cause—loose credit abetted by the banking sector—is always the same.

One reason the cause is so little understood is that there has been no comprehensive account of the history of banking in the United States that incorporates an understanding of the Austrian theory of the trade cycle and knowledge of the ways that politics distorts free markets. At last, we have just such a treatise from the hand of the master of American economic history.

Rothbard died in 1995, leaving several large manuscripts dedicated to American banking history. In the course of his career, meanwhile, he had published other pieces along the same lines, but they appeared in venues not readily accessible. Given the desperate need for a single volume that covers the topic, the Mises Institute put together this thrilling book, now available through the new Mises Institute online store.

Sections in this 500-page treatise:

I. "The History of Money and Baking Before the Twentieth Century." This was Rothbard's contribution to the minority report of the US Gold Commission and treats the evolution of the US monetary system from its colonial beginnings.

II. "Origins of the Federal Reserve." This thrilling paper lay unpublished for a long time and only recently appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. It is easily the most comprehensive account in print. It names names and shows the constellation of interest-group affiliations that led to its creation.

III. "From Hoover to Roosevelt: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Elites." This previously unpublished paper goes into great detail on how the Morgan and Rockefeller financial interests shaped the political and behavior of the Fed.

IV. "The Gold-Exchange Standard in the Interwar Years." This large section has appeared in print but not in its full version. Rothbard elucidates the reasons why the British and US government in the 1920s re-created the gold standard in a manner that was profoundly flawed and potentially inflationary (leading to the Great Depression).

V. "The New Deal and the International Monetary System" This section appeared in a volume first published in 1976 and which is now very difficult to find. Rothbard argues that an abrupt shift occurred in monetary policy just before the US entered World War. He shows who benefited from the shift from dollar nationalism to dollar imperialism. He concludes with a smashing attack and expose of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944.

This book examines:

• The origin of the word "dollar" 
• The boom-bust cycle long before the American Revolution 
• The wealthy merchants behind the Massachusetts Land Bank, an early inflationary scheme 
• The two abortive attempts to create a quasi-central bank early in a young nation 
• The meaning of the phrase "not worth a Continental" 
• Why those who wanted a central bank backed the overthrow of the Articles of Confederation 
• Why the founding fathers tried to suppress paper currency 
• The pernicious influence of Alexander Hamilton in using banking to centralize power 
• The government privileges enjoyed by the First and Second Banks of the United States 
• How the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideological movements succeeded in crushing the First and Second Banks of the US 
• Why the US "free banking" system of 1830 to 1860 was not really free 
• The awful consequences for money and economic life of the wars of 1776, 1812, 1860   
• The real reason for wildcat banking (this was not free enterprise at work) 
• The Connecticut banker who sued New York banks in 1816 for payment of notes and how the New York press savaged him 
• The correspondence between brilliant Philadelphia state senator Condy Raguet and the English economist David Ricardo 
• The Delaware Senator who rightly predicted that the Second Bank of the US would be "nothing more than simply a paper-making machine" 
• How the Panic of 1819 makes the collapse of the Nasdaq look mild by comparison 
• The wild shift between inflation and deflation and back again that last from 1838 to 1840 
• How California's and Oregon's early merchant settlers resisted and fought paper currency 
• The tax the post-Civil War national bank imposed to harm state banks, and those who became rich as a result 
• The political links between the advocates of high tariffs, soft money,  and big government  after the Civil War 
• The root cause of the panics of 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907: reserve pyramiding and excess money creation 
• How the decade between 1880 and 1890 achieved high economic growth, along with falling prices 
• The hidden religious issues that divided inflationist and sound-money voters in the late 19^th century (Catholics and Protestants disagreed on more than just theology) 
• The interest groups behind the demand for an "elastic" money supply 
• The originators of the view that capitalism leads to imperialism (no, not Lenin) 
• The takeover of the American economic profession by  the German Historical School 
• Paper money as the secret goal of those who backed gold-exchange standard (as versus a real gold-coin standard) 
• The leading economists who naively blessed the creation of the Federal Reserve 
• Herbert Hoover: an early advocate of counter-cyclical policy 
• Hoover's ridiculous attack on short sellers 
• The Fed's unsuccessful attempt to inflate from 1929 to 1933 and the public's refusal to cooperate 
• Why the problem in 1930 was too little liquidation, not too much 
• How the Hoover campaign against hording delayed recovery 
• The power elite's shift to the left with the election of FDR 
• Economist Irving Fisher's personal stake in seeing the stock market reflated in the New Deal 
• The Morgan-Rockefeller war, how it led to New Deal central planning, and who won 
• How the New Deal roped the accounting profession into the regulatory state 
• The year the centralization of banking power moved from New York to DC 
• The drive for American exports and the economic causes of the Second World War 
• Keynes's foiled plot for a postwar global inflation 
• Conditions that could lead to a recreation of the currency blocs of the 1930s

The treatise includes an interpretative essay by economist Joseph Salerno, who explains how Rothbard's method of writing history departs substantially, and with great effect, from the conventional methods of doing economic history. To Rothbard, economic history is the working out of human action through the economic political sphere. To report only data and anonymous forces at work is to rob the narrative of its most crucial element. No account of the history of American banking is more informative, dramatic, and comprehensively enlightening as this one.

Order Rothbard's History of Money and Banking in the United States.

• Songs from the Mises-Kreis, recordings made at the 20th anniversary on the Fun Page. 
• 2003 Posters and Ads 
• New issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 
• Mises's Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow 
• New Working Papers 
• New Tributes to Mises

In a long section available to subscribers [you can read the entire report in PDF], The Economist magazine of September 26, 2002, has surveyed various theories of the business cycle, including the Austrian School. It says in part:

• Austrian business-cycle theory . This is the oldest, developed by Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek in the early 20th century. Unlike Keynes, who thought recessions were caused by insufficient demand, these economists put them down to excess supply brought about by overinvestment. As a result of mutually reinforcing movements in credit, investment and profits, each boom contains the seeds of the subsequent recession and each recession the seeds of the subsequent boom.

The section is not without flaws, of course. William Anderson comments:

"the writer does not adequately explain to me why Austrian Theory -- which is only partially explained -- has been 'discredited.'  He refers to 'overinvestment' while the Austrian theory is a malinvestment theory.  The problem is not 'too much supply,' but rather investment into lines of production that cannot be sustained.

"What amazes me is that the author lays out all of the pieces, and even the half-baked Austrian theory that he describes in his article, but still cannot put the pieces together.  Instead, he looks at the pieces and then tries to say there are many different causes of business downturns and concludes that the central banks must rescue the various economies. We have the answers in front of us on how to get out of this mess, yet policymakers and their mainstream economist allies continue to grope around in the dark when the light is available."

Two new issues of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics are now online.

 "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation,"
Ludwig von Mises (1920)  

Mises's seminal essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" demonstrated the impossibility of rational economic decision-making in absence of private property and the market process. Business accounting, far from being a police function of the state, is an essential feature of the profit-and-loss system itself, and something that cannot be replicated under socialism or even within government bureaucracy.  

When this essay first appeared, it inspired a decades-long debate, but even today it has so much to teach us about the functioning of the price system, the role of private property, and the market economy generally. It is available now, at no charge, in a convenient PDF format: Economic Calculation In The Socialist Commonwealth

"The periodically returning crises of cyclical changes in business conditions are the effect of attempts, undertaken repeatedly, to underbid the interest rates which develop on the unhampered market," Ludwig von Mises (1931) 

A stock-market boom turns to bust, the macroeconomy seems resistant to recovery, and the political establishment tries to blame the greed of corporate moguls: the time was 1931. Amidst an anticapitalist frenzy, Ludwig von Mises went to work applying his theory of the business cycle, first articulated in 1912, to explain the Great Depression of Europe and America.

From his 1923 and 1928 essays warning of the dangers of created expansion, to his later work criticizing alternative theories, his unrelenting theme was that the crisis could not be understood apart from the actions of the central bank. Now, Mises's great interwar essays on business cycle theory are available in a new PDF edition from the Mises Institute, available for download at no charge: On the Manipulation of Money and Credit.

Notes from Compiler        Part 1  Books, 1915-1993 Articles 1918-1936         Part 2 Articles, 1937-1938         Part 3 Articles 1939-1940

Part 4 Articles 1941-1942          Part 5 Articles 1943-1945           Part 6 Articles 1946-1950           Part 7 Articles 1951-1987

Austrian Audio from Blackstone Audio

• Human Action by Ludwig von Mises 
• Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises 
• Liberalism by Ludwig von Mises

The final product is far from perfect, but the Mises Institute is pleased to have cooperated in the making of the three-part PBS special The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. The show features a discussion of the ideas and influence of Ludwig von Mises and his students and colleagues, including Mises's seminal 1920 article on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. The book on which the series is based was reviewed in the QJAE. The book is certainly worth owning and reading.

New on Mises.org: new issues of The Free Market, proceedings from the Austrian Scholars Conference 8, new pdf editions of Mises's books, and new Working Papers.

• Llewellyn H. Rockwell is interviewed in www.Frontpagemag.com on the continuing problem of the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality as discussed by Ludwig von Mises in his 1956 book by that title. See: An Interview with Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 
• In times of presidential consolidation, we need to deal honestly with the problem of executive power. The Mises Institute has published Reassessing the Presidency, the most thorough libertarian reconstruction of presidential history ever. The book grows out of a 1998 conference on the topic, the lectures from which are now available online. See Audio: Reassessing the Presidency. 
• In addition to our outstanding daily offerings, the Mises Institute has made available new issues of the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, as well as a new online periodical: Essays in Political Economy. (In particular, if you are fed up with propaganda from all sides on the issue of Social Security reform, see the comprehensive study by John Attarian: "The Roots of the Social Security Myth.")

September 29, 2001, is the 120th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises's birth. You can read George Reisman's tribute written on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The Mises Institute celebrated this great day by dedicating a new campus to research, teaching, and publishing in the Misesian tradition. The dedication was accompanied by a conference on the philosophical foundations and controversies surrounding the issue of human freedom.

The Schlarbaum Prize was awarded to Antony G.N. Flew, and a magnificent new wall hanging, made for us in Napal featuring the Mises Family Crest, is now displayed in the conservatory. Professor Flew spoke during dinner following a gala reception. 

In its August 20, 2001, issue (registration required), Forbes writes: "excessive or misallocated investment ('malinvestment') is at the heart of a business-cycle theory that, at the time of the Great Depression, was a serious competitor with Keynesianism. Named after the birthplace of its two major proponents, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, 'Austrian Economics' has attracted new attention with the discrediting of Keynesianism-and with the unusual characteristics of this postboom economy."

Frédéric Bastiat: Two Hundred Years On

by Joseph R. Stromberg

French laissez faire liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801-December 24, 1850) has suffered over the years from a particularly bad press. Karl Marx called him "the shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics." This portrait may have stemmed from Marx's resentment towards a political writer whose writing was clear and who gained a large audience in his lifetime. There is no body of literature asking What Bastiat Really Meant, whereas a cottage industry arose in the case of Marx. And of course Bastiat was a great enemy and trenchant critic of socialism. But Bastiat has been also dismissed by those who might have been expected to be friendlier towards him.    Read the essay.

This is a picture of the very nice Russian edition of Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (1949, 1966). It is a translation of the third edition by A.V. Kuryaeva, edited by S.A. Sagitova, and published in 2000 by Economika, 121864, Moscow, Berejkovskaya str #6.

The first printing was 2,000 copies and it has sold rapidly. You can find more information at the site of Grigory Sopov.

Murray Rothbard's Economics of State Interventionism is now available in Czech. This 450-page book (no English book with similar title) includes "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics" from The Logic of Action and Power and Market. Translation is by Josef Sima and Dan Stastny of  The Liberal Institute, the Prague-based center of Austrian economics. Contact them for more information.