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The Top Dozen Books on Austrian Economics

Excerpt from Gary North:

The list begins with books that are easier to read. The list gets progressively more rigorous.

1. What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1964), by Murray Rothbard. This is an easy to read book. It is short: a long article. It introduces a crucial topic, one which is central to Austrian school economics: money. Rothbard’s presentation sets forth his view of how central banking has undermined reliable, predictable money.

2. The Case for a 100% Gold Dollar (1962), by Rothbard. This extends his discussion in the first book. It is another long article.

3. Mises on Money (2012), by Gary North. This presents the main ideas of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, as first presented by Mises.

4. America’s Great Depression (1963), by Rothbard. This book presents the case against the Federal Reserve in the 1920’s and against Herbert Hoover’s interventions, 1930-33.

5. Bureaucracy (1944), by Ludwig von Mises. This short book shows the differences between profit management (free market) and bureaucracy (state). It is about 130 pages. It is easy to read. It shows why business techniques of efficiency are useless for reforming government. The funding is different.

6. The Road to Serfdom (1944), by F. A. Hayek. This is the most widely known book from an Austrian standpoint. It was a best-seller. It presents the case against government intervention in the name of liberty, not efficiency. Chapter 10 is great: “Why the Worst Get on Top.”

7. Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920), by Mises. This short book converted a generation of young socialists to the free market. Hayek was one of them. Mises showed how socialism is inherently irrational, for it has no rational pricing system.

8. Socialism (1922), by Mises. This extended his discussion in the previous book. It is the classic book ever written against all forms of socialism.

9. Human Action (1949), by Mises. This is his magnum opus. This was the first book to defend free market economic theory consistently in every area of the economy that is governed by the price system. It is comprehensive as no previous economics book had been.

10. Man, Economy, and State (1962), by Rothbard. This presents Human Action with the paraphernalia of college-level economics. It has lots of graphs. It has lots of footnotes. It is well organized. It is clear, as Rothbard’s books always are.

11. Economic Logic (3rd ed.), by Mark Skousen. This is an Economics 1 college textbook. It covers the basics. If you ever have to take a beginning course in economics, read this book in the month before you enroll.

12. Individualism and Economic Order (1948), by Hayek. This is a collection of his articles. The key article is Chapter 4 on decentralized economic knowledge.

Not for the fainthearted:

13. Market Theory and the Price System (1963), by Israel Kirzner. This is an upper division college textbook in price theory. It is tough slogging. It went out of print half a century ago. He never revised it. He later abandoned all traces of the #1 methodological tool of analysis of all such textbooks: equilibrium. The idea of equilibrium is based on a hypothetical and inherently misleading assumption, perfect foreknowledge. Far better is this book:

14. Competition and Entrepreneurship (1973), by Kirzner. He made his academic reputation with this book. It distinguishes between risk and uncertainty, a distinction that goes back to Frank Knight’s greatest book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921). Mises favorably cited Knight’s book in Human Action. Kirzner’s book undermines all of the graphs in Market Theory and the Price System. Textbook graphs assume equilibrium. There is no better book refuting equilibrium than Competition and Entrepreneurship. There is not one graph and not one mathematical formula in the book.

Most of these books are available from the Mises Institute, either as printed books or as free PDF’s. Skim each one online. If you like it, order a printed version. Then read it, pencil or highlighter in hand.

When Do We Remove Our Tefillin?

Wearing Tefillin All Day

May 25, 18

Halakhic Positions of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik by R. Aharon Ziegler

We tend to look askance at someone wearing Tefillin in the afternoon. To most of us, it’s a strange sight and we wonder why that person had not donned his Tefillin in the morning like the rest of us. It does not occur to us that the person might indeed have put them on in the proper time of the morning hours but he harbors a need to wear them all day long. Is that really wrong or is it perhaps meritorious to wear them all day long?

From the Gemara Menachot it certainly appears that the Amora’im wore their Tefillin all day long. The Gemara asks (36a), “Until when may one wear his Tefillin?” And the answer of the First Tanna is, “until the sun [finishes] setting”, R’ Ya’akov states, “he may leave the Tefillin on until pedestrians have vanished from the market”, and the Chachamim state, “until the time of sleeping”. Furthermore, the Rambam states explicitly (Hilchot Tefillin 4:25), that the Kedusha of Tefillin is so great, that as long as one wears them on the head and arm, his personality will remain humble and G-d fearing. Therefore, one should make every effort to wear them all day long, for that is indeed the proper Mitzvah. And then the Rambam adds, that it is told about Rav, the disciple of Rabbeinu HaKadosh that all his life no-one saw him walking four Amot without Torah, without Tzitzit, or without Tefillin. Then Rambam concludes, although it is meritorious to wear Tefillin all day there is a special Mitzvah to wear them during Tefillah.

Rav Soloveitchik analyzed this Mitzvah by stating that from the perspective of simply fulfilling the Mitzvah of binding the Tefillin, as found in Devarim 6:8. “U’KESHARTAM LE’OT AL YADECHA VE’HAYU LETOTAFOT BEIN EINECHA” (You should bind them as a sign upon your arm and let them be ornaments between your eyes), one fulfills that aspect of the Mitzvah by merely donning them for a few minutes a day. However, from the perspective of the Gavrah, the person, the effect and Kedusha that the Tefillin have and leave upon the person that aspect of the Mitzvah deserves a greater length of time, and wearing them all day long is not hard to understand. Tefillin is the only Mitzvah of the Torah that even the non-Jewish world will look upon us with awe and respect, as the Torah states, “Then all the people of the earth will see that the Name of HaShem is proclaimed upon you and they will revere you” (Devarim 28:10). So, although it is not our minhag to wear the Tefillin all day, nevertheless, the concept of doing so is certainly a meritorious one.

From Torah Musings, here.

Everyone Acts in Their Own Interest, Including Politicians

Solving Whose Problem?

Thomas Sowell | Posted: Nov 24, 2009

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems– of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.

Many of the things the government does that may seem stupid are not stupid at all, from the standpoint of the elected officials or bureaucrats who do these things.

The current economic downturn that has cost millions of people their jobs began with successive administrations of both parties pushing banks and other lenders to make mortgage loans to people whose incomes, credit history and inability or unwillingness to make a substantial down payment on a house made them bad risks.

Was that stupid? Not at all. The money that was being put at risk was not the politicians’ money, and in most cases was not even the government’s money. Moreover, the jobs that are being lost by the millions are not the politicians’ jobs– and jobs in the government’s bureaucracies are increasing.

Continue reading…

From Town Hall, here.

The Marshall Plan Myth

The Marshall Plan Isn’t the Success Story You Think it Is

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06/05/2018 

To this day, the Marshall Plan, that enormous government program for foreign aid and wealth redistribution, is still held up as a model of good government planning, and of the benefits of forcibly redistributing the taxpayers’ money.

In American politics, this opinion has nearly risen to the level of ultimate truth. For example, while domestic welfare programs are often met with derision from American conservatives, the Marshall Plan, which is founded on the same ideological foundation as the American welfare states, receives almost universal approval from Americans left and right.

Thus, it is not surprising that politicians and pundits continue to invoke the Marshall plan to push for more modern day programs based on the idea that if governments spread around the wealth, then prosperity will naturally result.

Tuesday in Europe, for example, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani invoked the Marshall plan to push for more EU spending programs in Africa designed to attract wealth there via sweetheart deals between European regimes and African contractors. Many of those firms, of course, are likely to be European-owned. And the scheme is reminiscent of the Marshall Plan, so it’s sure to be a success!

Not coincidentally, Tajani delivered his remarks on the 71st anniversary of Secretary of State George Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech calling for what became the Marshall Plan. He outlined the plan to flood Europe with government welfare checks in order to help Europe overcome the fact that much of the continent’s capital had been destroyed in World War II.

The money spent totaled over 100 billion dollars in today’s dollars. And given that the American economy was but a small fraction of what it is today, this was an enormous sum.

The rhetoric behind the idea was nothing new. In 1947, it was routine to claim that government spending of the New Deal and World War II had ended the poverty of the Great Depression. That’s not the reality, of course. As economic historian Robert Higgs has shown, the New Deal made the Depression worse. Nor did World War II end the Depression. But at the time, this was a common misperception.

So, if redistributing the wealth worked so well to end poverty in the 1930s, why not do it all again in post-war Europe?

Moreover, it was a winning political strategy for President Truman. As noted by Charles Mee in his book The Marshall Plan:

[Truman needed] some large program that would let him recapture the initiative, something big enough to enable him to gather in all the traditional factions of the Democratic Party and also some middle-of-the-road Republicans, and at the same time, something that would hamper the Republican phalanx.

So, the US government set to work funneling taxpayer dollars to both foreign regimes and to American corporations who could leverage their political influence with foreign regimes to get some of that money.

But here’s the rub. There’s not actually evidence that this worked.

As Thomas Woods notes in this lecture on foreign aid, it’s easy to see why the Marshall Plan has the reputation it does. After all, the Marshall Plan was implemented in the late forties, and during that time, the economies of Western Europe greatly recovered.

But this is a case of mere correlation being woefully insufficient to prove causation.

Continue reading…

From Mises.org, here.