The name of this free-market economic school acknowledges the fact that many of the school’s “founding fathers” were Austrian nationals and disciples of the Austrian economist Karl Menger. Of course, the “Austrian school” is not a school in the traditional sense of the word denoting a physical structure; the term defines those who believe in pure free-market economics and laissez-faire principles. The Austrian school has a long history of amazingly accurate economic predictions while at the same time being completely ignored by the political establishment and virtually ignored by the mainstream media.
But that lack of credibility to the public faded entirely once the Austrian school’s predictions again came true. One of the few exceptions to the media blackout against the Austrian school before 2008 was Euro Pacific Capital President Peter Schiff, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut, who had given a number of television interviews in advance of the current recession. Schiff repeatedly pointed out with astonishing accuracy what would happen and — more amazingly — why it would happen.
Arguing that big-government arguments for intervention in the marketplace would not really replace laissez-faire chaos, von Mises’ logical critique of state planning was withering against socialism and fascism/Keynesianism. Von Mises wrote in Human Action, “The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is freedom versus government omnipotence.” Von Mises explains that “laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.”
Von Mises championed the laissez-faire theory that government should not interfere in the economy because it is not competent to make the people happier or more prosperous than the people can do for themselves by making their own economic decisions. “Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” von Mises noted. “The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.”
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