Saturday, August 3, 2019

The Socialist Theory of Exploitation Is Fallacious, and When Considered from the Point of View of Theoretical Soundness, It Occupies One of the Lowest Places Among All Theories of Interest

I have devoted an exceptionally and disproportionately large amount of space to the discussion of the exploitation theory. I have done so advisedly. Certainly none of the other doctrines has approached it in the influence it exercised on the thoughts and the emotions of whole generations. And just our era has seen it at its apogee. And unless I am mistaken, its descent has already begun. But it is to be expected that there will still be attempts at stubborn defense or at revivification by metamorphosis. And so I thought I should be serving the good cause if I avoided restricting myself to a purely retrospective critique of the  developmental stages of the doctrine, now definitely terminated. I thought it would be well to look forward, and even now cast some critical illumination on the intellectual theatre of operations to which, according to definitely discernible signs, its adherents are intending to transfer the renewed controversy.

So far as that old socialist theory of exploitation is concerned, which has been presented here in the person of its two most distinguished protagonists, Rodbertus and Marx, I cannot render a verdict any less severe than the one I handed down in the first edition of this book. It is not only fallacious but, considered from the point of view of theoretical soundness, it occupies one of the lowest places among all theories of interest. Grievous as may be the errors in logic made by the representatives of other theories, I hardly think that anywhere else are the worst errors concentrated in such abundance—frivolous, premature assumptions, specious dialecticism, inner contradictions and blindness to the facts of reality. The socialists are excellent critics, they are exceptionally weak theorists.

—Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Exploitation Theory of Socialism-Communism: The Idea that All Unearned Income (Rent, Interest and Profit) Involves Economic Injustice; An Extract, 3rd ed. (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1975), xxx.


Antagonistic Interests Exist Between Producers and Those Who Acquire Wealth Nonproductively and/or Noncontractually in the Pre-Marxist View on Exploitation

In the Marxist tradition this stage of social development is termed “monopoly capitalism,” “finance capitalism,” or “state monopoly capitalism.” The descriptive part of Marxist analyses is generally valuable. In unearthing the close personal and financial links between state and business, they usually paint a much more realistic picture of the present economic order than do the mostly starry-eyed “bourgeois economists.” Analytically, however, they get almost everything wrong and turn the truth upside down.

The traditional, correct pre-Marxist view on exploitation was that of radical laissez-faire liberalism as espoused by, for instance, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. According to them, antagonistic interests do not exist between capitalists as owners of factors of production and laborers, but between, on the one hand, the producers in society, i.e., homesteaders, producers and contractors, including businessmen as well as workers, and on the other hand, those who acquire wealth nonproductively and/or noncontractually, i.e., the state and state-privileged groups, such as feudal landlords. This distinction was first confused by  Saint-Simon, who had at some time been influenced by Comte and Dunoyer, and who classified market businessmen along with feudal lords and other state-privileged groups as exploiters. Marx took up this confusion from Saint-Simon and compounded it by making only capitalists exploiters and all workers exploited, justifying this view through a Ricardian labor theory of value and his theory of surplus value. Essentially, this view on exploitation has remained typical for Marxism to this day despite Böhm-Bawerk’s smashing refutation of Marx’s exploitation theory and his explanation of the difference between factor prices and output prices through time preference (interest). To this day, whenever Marxist theorists talk about the exploitative character of monopoly capitalism, they see the root cause of this in the continued existence of the private ownership of means of production. Even if they admit a certain degree of independence of the state apparatus from the class of monopoly capitalists (as in the version of “state monopoly capitalism”), for them it is not the state that makes capitalist exploitation possible; rather it is the fact that the state is an agency of capitalism, an organization that transforms the narrow-minded interests of individual capitalists into the interest of an ideal universal capitalist (the ideelle Gesamtkapitalist), which explains the existence of exploitation.

In fact, as explained, the truth is precisely the opposite: It is the state that by its very nature is an exploitative organization, and capitalists can engage in  exploitation only insofar as they stop being capitalists and instead join forces with the state. Rather than speaking of state monopoly capitalism, then, it would be more appropriate to call the present system “state financed monopoly socialism,” or “bourgeois socialism.”

—Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Banking, Nation States, and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order,” in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006), 95-97n18.


Friday, August 2, 2019

Mises's Fundamental Axiom, the Nub of Praxeology, Is the Existence of Human Action; Men Have Some Ends and They Use Some Means To Try To Attain Them

We turn now to the Fundamental Axiom (the nub of praxeology): the existence of human action. From this absolutely true axiom can be spun almost the whole fabric of economic theory. Some of the immediate logical implications that flow from this premise are: the means-ends relationship, the time-structure of production, time-preference, the law of diminishing marginal utility, the law of optimum returns, etc. It is this crucial axiom that separates praxeology from the other methodological viewpoints-and it is this axiom that supplies the critical “apriori” element in economics.

First, it must be emphasized that whatever role “rationality” may play in  Professor Machlup's theory, it plays no role whatever for Professor Mises. Hutchison charges that Mises claims “all economic action was (or must be) ‘rational.’ ” This is flatly incorrect. Mises assumes nothing whatever about the rationality of human action (in fact, Mises does not use the concept at all). He assumes nothing about the wisdom of man's ends or about the correctness of his means. He “assumes” only that men act, i.e., that they have some ends, and use some means to try to attain them. This is Mises’ Fundamental Axiom, and it is this axiom that gives the whole praxeological structure of economic theory built upon it its absolute and apodictic certainty.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “In Defense of ‘Extreme Apriorism,’” Southern Economic Journal 23, no. 3 (January 1957): 317.


Thursday, August 1, 2019

There Is No Consistency in Keynes's Use of the Term “Rate of Interest”; Keynes Also Fails to Adhere to His Own Theory of Interest (Liquidity Preference and Quantity of Money)

Let us consider first Keynes's failure to adhere to fixed meanings for his terms.

Keynes at times uses the rate of interest to mean a rate of discount, measuring the premium on present goods over future goods. This is implied in his initial definition of the marginal efficiency of capital, to which later reference is made on page 135 of this book. It is, moreover, made explicit by Keynes on page 93 of his book, where he says that, as an approximation, we can identify the rate of time-discounting, i.e., the ratio of exchange between present goods and future goods, with the rate of interest. Later, however, Keynes gives us a radically different theory of interest. He makes the rate of interest depend on liquidity preference and the quantity of money. And he holds that interest is not paid for the purpose of inducing men to save but for the purpose of inducing men not to hoard. He holds that if money is made sufficiently abundant so that it can satiate liquidity preference, it will pull down, not merely the short time rate of interest or the short time money rates, but also the whole complex of interest rates, long and short. The whole complex of interest rates (with a given liquidity preference scale) can be governed, and is governed, in his system, by the abundance or scarcity of money. Interest becomes a phenomenon of money par excellence. Strangely enough, however, we find Keynes playing with the notion of commodity rates of interest, or “own rates of interest,” the rate between future wheat and present wheat, and designating this rate as the “wheat rate of interest.” Every commodity can have its own rate of interest in terms of itself, and Keynes says that there is no reason why the wheat rate of interest should be equal to the copper rate of interest, because the relation between the spot and future contracts as quoted in the markets is notoriously different for different commodities. The reader will find whatever he pleases in Keynes about the rates of interest, though his formal theory is the doctrine that the quantity of money, taken in conjunction with liquidity preference, governs the rate of interest.

But Keynes does not adhere long to his own theory of interest. In the same volume, 29 pages later, he has abandoned it. After saying, on pages 167-168, that the supply of money in relation to liquidity preference will govern the whole complex of interest rates, long and short, on page 197 he criticizes the Federal Reserve banks for their open market policy, 1933-1934, on the ground that they purchased only short term securities, the effect of which “may, of course, be mainly confined to the very short term rate of interest and have little reaction on the much more important long term rates of interest.” And he calls upon the central banks to regulate all rates of interest by having fixed rates at which they will buy obligations of differing maturities, long and short.

There is no consistency in Keynes's use of the term “rate of interest” in this volume.

--Benjamin M. Anderson, “Digression on Keynes,” in The Critics of Keynesian Economics, ed. Henry Hazlitt (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1995), 199-200.


Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Hardly Any Economists in America Anticipated that Price-Level Stabilization during the 1920s Would Lead to the Economic Depression that Began in October 1929

Hardly any economists in America anticipated that price-level stabilization during the 1920s would lead to the economic depression that began in October 1929. One of the few who saw a danger in this policy of the Federal Reserve System was Benjamin M. Anderson. As the senior economist for the Chase National Bank of New York City throughout this period, Dr. Anderson authored the Chase Economic Bulletin, which was usually published four to five times every year. He offered detailed analyses of the economic currents in the United States, with special attention to monetary and banking policy and its likely effects on general market conditions. He also often critically evaluated the theories underlying Federal Reserve policy, most particularly the notion of stabilizing the price level as a guide for economic stability.

The most insightful bulletins on this theme were “The Fallacy of ‘The Stabilized Dollar’” (August 1920); “The Gold Standard vs. ‘A Managed Currency’” (March 1925); “Bank Money and the Capital Supply” (November 1926); “Bank Expansion and Savings” (June 1928); “Two ‘New Eras’ Compared: 1896–1903 and 1921–1928” (February 1929); “Commodity Price Stabilization as a False Goal of Central Bank Policy” (May 1929); and “The Financial Situation” (November 1929).

He argued that the Federal Reserve had used its powers to reduce the reserve requirements of member banks, had set the discount rate at which member banks could directly borrow from the Fed below the market rates of interest, and had used “open-market operations” to inject new reserves into the banking system. The increase in bank reserves available for lending purposes as a result of these Fed policies had generated a huge increase in demand deposits and especially in time deposits. As a result, a large monetary inflation had been created by the Federal Reserve during the 1920s.

But the price level had remained stable, producing, Benjamin Anderson said, a false sense of economic stability. In 1926 and 1928, he argued that the amount of bank credit created by Fed policy enabled the financing of new investments in excess of actual savings in the economy. Influenced by Joseph Schumpeter’s The Theory of Economic Development (1911), Anderson argued that monetary expansion in the form of bank credit lowered interest rates, which attracted additional borrowing for long-term investment projects. These additional bank loans with newly created money enabled investment borrowers to bid resources and labor away from consumption and other uses in the economy and redirect their use towards various types of capital formation. The monetary expansion, in other words, induced the undertaking of investment activities in excess of the actual voluntary savings upon which a stable pattern of investment is ultimately dependent. Thus, Federal Reserve policy was creating a serious imbalance in the savings-investment relationship of the American economy.

Anderson estimated that between 1921 and 1928, demand deposits at Federal Reserve member banks had increased 33.8%, while time deposits (whose minimum reserve requirements had been set by the Fed significantly lower than those required for demand deposits) had increased by 135.1%. The resulting increase in lendable funds, he said, fed real-estate and construction booms and produced a dramatic rise in stock-market speculation.

In February 1929, Anderson pointed out that “excessive bank reserves generate bank expansion, that bank expansion running in excess of commercial needs will overflow into capital uses and speculative employments, and that low interest rates and abundant credit will ordinarily reflect themselves in rapidly rising capital values.” In Anderson’s view, these all pointed to the inevitability of a corrective downturn.

--Richard M. Ebeling, “Benjamin Anderson and the False Goal of Price-Level Stabilization,” in Monetary Central Planning and the State (Fairfax, VA: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 2015), Kindle e-book.


Propagandists for Central Banking Have Convinced People that “Free Banking” Would Be Banking Out of Control with Wild Inflationary Bursts and the Supply of Money Soaring to Infinity

Let us assume now that banks are not required to act as genuine money warehouses, and are unfortunately allowed to act as debtors to their depositors and noteholders rather than as bailees retaining someone else’s property for safekeeping. Let us also define a system of free banking as one where banks are treated like any other business on the free market. Hence, they are not subjected to any government control or regulation, and entry into the banking business is completely free. There is one and only one government “regulation”: that they, like any other business, must pay their debts promptly or else be declared insolvent and be put out of business. In short, under free banking, banks are totally free, even to engage in fractional reserve banking, but they must redeem their notes or demand deposits on demand, promptly and without cavil, or otherwise be forced to close their doors and liquidate their assets.

Propagandists for central banking have managed to convince most people that free banking would be banking out of control, subject to wild inflationary bursts in which the supply of money would soar almost to infinity. Let us examine whether there are any strong checks, under free banking, on inflationary credit expansion.

In fact, there are several strict and important limits on inflationary credit expansion under free banking. One we have already alluded to. If I set up a new Rothbard Bank and start printing bank notes and issuing bank deposits out of thin air, why should anyone accept these notes or deposits? Why should anyone trust a new and fledgling Rothbard Bank? Any bank would have to build up trust over the years, with a record of prompt redemption of its debts to depositors and noteholders before customers and others on the market will take the new bank seriously. The buildup of trust is a prerequisite for any bank to be able to function, and it takes a long record of prompt payment and therefore of noninflationary banking, for that trust to develop.

There are other severe limits, moreover, upon inflationary monetary expansion under free banking. One is the extent to which people are willing to use bank notes and deposits. If creditors and vendors insist on selling their goods or making loans in gold or government paper and refuse to use banks, the extent of bank credit will be extremely limited. If people in general have the wise and prudent attitudes of many “primitive” tribesmen and refuse to accept anything but hard gold coin in exchange, bank money will not get under way or wreak inflationary havoc on the economy.

But the extent of banking is a general background restraint that does precious little good once banks have become established. A more pertinent and magnificently powerful weapon against the banks is the dread bank run—a weapon that has brought many thousands of banks to their knees. A bank run occurs when the clients of a bank—its depositors or noteholders—lose confidence in their bank, and begin to fear that the bank does not really have the ability to redeem their money on demand. Then, depositors and noteholders begin to rush to their bank to cash in their receipts, other clients find out about it, the run intensifies and, of course, since a fractional reserve bank is indeed inherently bankrupt—a run will close a bank’s door quickly and efficiently.

--Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 111-113.


Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Ben Bernanke Spoke of Printing Money and Distributing It from Helicopters and about Roosevelt's 40% Devaluation of the Dollar Against Gold As Effective Weapons Against Deflation

This doctrine of globally beneficial dollar devaluation in recession had got further embellishment in Bernanke’s reading of the Japanese experience of the 1990s. Bernanke sympathized with the view that where monetary policy became constrained (in bringing about recovery) by a zero-rate bound (inability of rates to fall below zero even though the equilibrium level of rates may indeed be negative), then devaluation was the way out of this (partly through generating inflation expectations) and internationally acceptable (not beggar-your-neighbour) in that all would gain from the return route to equilibrium. Bernanke, as recently appointed governor to the Federal Reserve, had reinforced this view in his notorious speech to the National Economists Club in Washington (November 2002) under the title of ‘Deflation: making sure it doesn’t happen here’.

Bernanke’s comments about printing money and distributing it from helicopters got the headlines at the time (and since). But in addition the new governor noted aloud:
Though a policy of intervening to affect the exchange value of the dollar is nowhere on the horizon today, it’s worth noting that there have been times when exchange rate policy has been an effective weapon against deflation. A striking example from US history is Franklin Roosevelt’s 40% devaluation of the dollar against gold in 1933–4, enforced by a program of gold purchases and domestic money creation. The devaluation and the rapid increase in money supply it permitted ended the US deflation remarkably quickly. Indeed consumer price inflation in the US, year-on-year, went from −10.3% in 1932 to −5.1% in 1933 to 3.4% in 1934. The economy grew strongly and by the way 1934 was one of the best years of the century for the stock market. If nothing else, the episode illustrates that monetary actions can have powerful effects on the economy, even when the nominal interest rate is at or near zero, as was the case at the time of Roosevelt’s devaluation.
--Brendan Brown, The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve: Manifesto for a Second Monetarist Revolution (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 115.


Monday, July 29, 2019

Capital Goods Can Only Be Used If Corresponding Quantities of Consumer Goods Are Fed into the Production Process to Sustain the Laborers Who Work with These Capital Goods

Strigl builds his theory of the macroeconomy on an original account of the part played by different forms of capital. In particular, he stresses the fundamental role that consumer goods, or means of subsistence, play in connection with the fact that production takes time. When consumer goods are used to sustain laborers engaged in time-consuming roundabout production processes, they are used as “free capital.” Since without sustenance for laborers no such roundabout production processes can be started at all, consumer-goods-used-as-capital are the most fundamental or “originary form” of capital.

This fundamental insight, that productively-used consumer goods are originary capital, had already been expressed in Jevons's wage-fund theory of capital, and it is still common stock in Austrian economics. However, no one has surpassed Strigl in systematically analyzing the implications thereof, and in integrating these findings into a theory of the macroeconomy. His legacy to present day capital theorists rests to a great extent mainly on this contribution.

One important implication of this insight is that it is unwarranted to conceive of capital from a purely technological point of view. Machines, buildings, etc.—that is, those capital goods most readily identified with the notion of capital—are themselves products of previous production processes which, ultimately, make use of labor, land, and “productively-used” consumer goods. Moreover, capital goods can only be used if corresponding quantities of consumer goods are fed into the production process to sustain the laborers who work with these capital goods. Using capital goods in production processes and supporting these processes with consumer goods are nothing but two aspects of “one and the same process.”  In short, the quantities and qualities of capital goods in use at any time depend ultimately on what people choose to do with the consumer goods they control. A man can choose to use all his consumer goods in “pure consumption” or to use a part of them (his “savings”) in “productive consumption”; that is, he can use this part to sustain himself or others while being engaged in a productive venture. Depending on such choices, consumer goods become either pure consumer goods or originary capital. Hence, whether one and the same physical object is capital depends ultimately on the choices of the market participants; capital formation has a subjective basis.

—Jörg Guido Hülsmann, introduction to Capital and Production, by Richard von Strigl (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000), xvii-xix.


The Federal Reserve as Engine of Reverse Robin Hood Redistribution

The Fed really abandoned all pretense of being “independent” of politics in the aftermath of “The Great Recession” of 2008, although it continues on, with the help of its academic supporters, with the rhetoric and propaganda of “Fed independence.” Specifically, the Fed made it ever so obvious that its primary concern is protecting the bonuses of the Wall Street investment banking titans who, in turn, supply millions of dollars in campaign “contributions” to the executive and legislative branches and the two major political parties. (It is not just a coincidence that the U.S. Treasury Secretary is almost always a top executive at Goldman Sachs). The Fed does this by responding to bursted bubbles in real estate and stock markets, among other places, by pumping even more liquidity into the economy, thereby creating new bubbles—and new profit opportunities for Wall Street speculators. As David A. Stockman (2013, p. 653) wrote in his book, The Great Deformation, “[T]he central banking branch of the state remains hostage to Wall Street speculators who threaten a hissy fit sell-off unless they are juiced again and again. Monetary policy has thus become an engine of reverse Robin Hood redistribution; it flails about implementing quasi-Keynesian demand-pumping theories that punish Main Street savers, workers, and businessmen while creating endless opportunities . . . for speculative gain in the Wall Street casino.” Thanks to the Fed, the machinery of the state and the machinery of reelection have become coterminous, says Stockman.

Monetary inflation enriches the “one percenters” on Wall Street while impoverishing just about everyone else. By deterring savings with its policy of artificially lowering interest rates the Fed destroys much of the essential ingredient of economic growth—savings, investment, and capital accumulation.

--Thomas DiLorenzo, "A Fraudulent Legend: The Myth of the Independent Fed," in The Fed at One Hundred: A Critical View on the Federal Reserve System, ed. David Howden and Joseph T. Salerno (Cham, CH: Springer International Publishing, 2014), 69-70.


Sunday, July 28, 2019

The Gold Standard Criticism of the Friedmanite Position Is that the Chicagoites Want a Free Market Between Entities that Are Different Units of the SAME Entity (Different Weights of Gold)

The Friedmanite program cannot be fully countered in its details; it must be considered at the level of its deepest assumptions. Namely, are currencies really fit subjects for “markets”? Can there be a truly “free market” between pounds, dollars, francs, etc.?

Let us begin by considering this problem: suppose that someone comes along and says, “The existing relationship between pounds and ounces is completely arbitrary. The government has decreed that 16 ounces are equal to 1 pound. But this is arbitrary government intervention; let us have a free market between ounces and pounds, and let us see what relationship the market will establish between ounces and pounds. Perhaps we will find that the market will decided that 1 pound equals 14 or 17 ounces.” Of course, everyone would find such a suggestion absurd. But why is it absurd? Not from arbitrary government edict, but because the pound is universally defined as consisting of 16 ounces. Standards of weight and measurement are established by common definition, and it is precisely their fixity that makes them indispensable to human life. Shifting relationships of pounds to ounces or feet to inches would make a mockery of any and all attempts to measure. But it is precisely the contention of the gold standard advocates that what we know as the names for different national currencies are not independent entities at all. They are not, in essence, different commodities like copper or wheat. They are, or they should be, simply names for different weights of gold or silver, and hence should have the same status as the fixed definitions for any set of weights and measures.

Let us bring our example a bit closer to the topic of money. Suppose that someone should come along and say, “The existing relationship between nickels and dimes is purely arbitrary. It is only the government that has decreed that two nickels equal one dime. Let us have a free market between nickels and dimes. Who knows? Maybe the market will decree that a dime is worth 7 cents or 11 cents. Let us try the market and see.”  Again, we would feel that such a suggestion would be scarcely less absurd. But again, why? What precisely is wrong with the idea? Again the point is that cents, nickels, and dimes are defined units of currency. The dollar is defined as equal to 10 dimes and 100 cents, and it would be chaotic and absurd to start calling for day-to-day changes in such definitions. Again, fixity of definition, fixity of units of weight and measure, is vital to any sort of accounting or calculation.

To put it another way: the idea of a market only makes sense  between different entities, between different goods and services, between, say, copper and wheat, or movie admissions. But the idea of a market makes no sense whatever between different units of the same entity: between, say, ounces of copper and pounds of copper. Units of measure must, to serve any purpose, remain as a fixed yardstick of account and reckoning.

The basic gold standard criticism of the Friedmanite position is that the Chicagoites are advocating a free market between entities that are in essence, and should be once more, different units of the same entity, i.e., different weights of the commodity gold. For the implicit and vital assumption of the Friedmanites is that every national currency—pounds, dollars, marks, and the like—is and should be an independent entity, a commodity in its own right, and therefore should fluctuate freely with one another.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “Title of Chapter: Subtitle of Chapter,” in Gold Is Money, ed. Hans F. Sennholz, Contributions in Economics and Economic History 12 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 26-28.


Murray N. Rothbard Criticizes the Chicago School's Definition of the Supply of Money as a Flagrant Example of Question-Begging

The concept of the supply of money plays a vitally important role, in differing ways, in both the Austrian and the Chicago Schools of economics. Yet, neither school has defined the concept in a full or satisfactory manner; as a result, we are never sure to which of the numerous alternative definitions of the money supply either school is referring.

The Chicago School definition is hopeless from the start. For, in a question-begging attempt to reach the conclusion that the money supply is the major determinant of national income, and to reach it by statistical rather than theoretical means, the Chicago School defines the money supply as that entity which correlates most closely with national income. This is one of the most flagrant examples of the Chicagoite desire to avoid essentialist concepts, and to “test” theory by statistical correlation; with the result that the supply of money is not really defined at all. Furthermore, the approach overlooks the fact that statistical correlation cannot establish causal connections; this can only be done by a genuine theory that works with definable and defined concepts.

In Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises set forth the essentials of the concept of the money supply in his Theory of Money and Credit, but no Austrian has developed the concept since then, and unsettled questions remain (e.g., are savings deposits properly to be included in the money supply?). And since the concept of the supply of money is vital both for the theory and for applied historical analysis of such consequences as inflation and business cycles, it becomes vitally important to try to settle these questions, and to demarcate the supply of money in the modern world. In The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises set down the correct guidelines: money is the general medium of exchange, the thing that all other goods and services are traded for, the final payment for such goods on the market.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “Austrian Definitions of the Supply of Money,” in Economic Controversies (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 727-728.