The major reason for Keynes’s rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.
As the greatest and last major crisis before 1836, the panic of 1819 holds considerable interest for the study of business cycles and for the present day. It was an economy in transition, as it were, to a state where business cycles as we know them would develop.
After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.
The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively ‘peaceful’ the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.
Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.
Economics has revealed a great truth about the natural law of human interaction: that not only is production essential to man’s prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange.
All government wars are unjust.
Only individuals can desire and act. The existence of an institution such as government becomes meaningful only through influencing the actions of those individuals who are and those who are not considered as members.
Play, as a consumers’ good, is subject to the law of marginal utility, as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods.
Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by ‘groups,’ ‘collectives,’ or ‘States,’ which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals.
Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.
‘The General Theory’ was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
The politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently.
Among intellectuals who consider themselves ‘scientific,’ the phrase ‘the nature of man’ is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.
One grave and fundamental Keynesian error is to persist in regarding the interest rate as a contract rate on loans instead of the price spreads between stages of production. The former, as we have seen, is only the reflection of the latter.
Praxeology – economics – provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments.
Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek’s continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it.
The State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it.
Pages: 1 2
