timeline Economics Timeline
The evolution of economic thought through Austrian School authors, books, and insights
"Love, friendship, and life are gratuitous. The supreme goods of human existence cannot be bought at any price."
menu_book Abundance, Generosity, and the State
Read Full Quote"Gratuitous goods and markets are not merely complementary but symbiotic. They feed into each other."
menu_book Abundance, Generosity, and the State
Read Full Quotemenu_book La Tyrannie fiscale
Exposes the French tax system as arbitrary, economically destructive, and morally indefensible, showing that high taxation is not a neutral technical matter but an act of coercion that penalises work,...
View Book"Only because scarcity exists is there even a problem of formulating moral laws; insofar as goods are superabundant ('free' goods), no conflict over the use of goods is possible and no action-coordination is needed."
menu_book Against Intellectual Property
Read Full Quote"Ideas are not naturally scarce. However, by recognizing a right in an ideal object, one creates scarcity where none existed before."
menu_book Against Intellectual Property
Read Full Quotemenu_book Against Intellectual Property
Drawing on Austrian property rights theory and the insight that ideas are non-scarce goods, argues that patents and copyrights are not natural rights but state-created monopolies that restrict the use...
View Bookmenu_book Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism
A comprehensive 1,143-page intellectual biography of Ludwig von Mises, tracing his life and the development of his economic and political thought from Vienna to New York, and his lifelong defense...
View Book"There are indeed only two possible visions of society and its organization: a liberal vision and a constructivist one."
menu_book Libéralisme
Read Full Quote"Every act of coercion that creates obstacles to exchange is a destroyer of wealth."
menu_book Libéralisme
Read Full Quotemenu_book Libéralisme
A systematic and uncompromising defence of classical liberalism, arguing that all social questions resolve into one fundamental choice between a liberal order founded on individual rights, private property, and voluntary...
View Bookmenu_book Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy
Comprehensive introduction to economic principles written for the general public, explaining how markets work and the effects of various economic policies without technical jargon
View Book"The essential difference between rich societies and poor societies does not stem from any greater effort the former devote to work, nor even from any greater technological knowledge the former hold. Instead it arises mainly from the fact that rich nations possess a more extensive network of capital goods wisely invested from an entrepreneurial standpoint."
menu_book Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles
Read Full Quote"The direct cause of massive unemployment is labour market inflexibility. In fact, state intervention in the labour market and union coercion, made possible by the privileges the legal system confers on unions, results in a series of regulations which make the labour market one of the most rigid."
menu_book Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles
Read Full Quotemenu_book Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles
The most systematic modern statement of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, demonstrating through history, legal theory, and economics that fractional reserve banking creates artificial credit expansion, distorts the...
View Book"The pattern is: (1) The anointed assert that there is some grave danger or crisis. (2) The anointed propose some course of action to deal with it. (3) Evidence that the proposed course of action has made things worse is either ignored or explained away. (4) The anointed proceed as if the policy were working, blaming any remaining problems on the inadequacy of commitment to the policy."
menu_book The Vision of the Anointed
Read Full Quote"In a broad or general sense, entrepreneurship actually coincides with human action."
menu_book Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship
Read Full Quotemenu_book Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship
Extends the Misesian impossibility of socialist calculation into a full theory of entrepreneurship, showing that socialism systematically destroys the entrepreneurial process through which society creates and coordinates economic knowledge, making...
View Book
menu_book Knowledge and Decisions
Analysis of how knowledge is used in economic decision-making, examining the role of prices, incentives, and institutions in coordinating dispersed knowledge across society
View Book
"Economics is not a thing of the past, nor is it a thing of the future. It is the science of every kind of human action. Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choices man determines both his scale of values and the means he employs for the attainment of the ends he is aiming at. Thus economics, as the general science of acting man, reaches far beyond the boundaries of economic science as ordinarily circumscribed."
menu_book Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
Read Full Quotemenu_book Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
Ludwig von Mises' magnum opus and the most comprehensive systematic treatment of economics from the Austrian School perspective. Mises develops praxeology, the science of human action, from first principles, deriving...
View Book"The third volume of Marx's Capital contradicts the first. A system erected on a certain fundamental principle receives, in the third volume, a superstructure in direct conflict with it. The contradiction is obvious and enormous."
menu_book Karl Marx and the Close of His System
Read Full Quotemenu_book Karl Marx and the Close of His System
Böhm-Bawerk's definitive refutation of Marxian economics, exposing the fatal internal contradiction between Volume I and Volume III of Das Kapital. Marx claimed in Volume I that commodities exchange according to...
View Book"Present goods are, as a rule, worth more than future goods of like kind and number. This proposition is the kernel and center of the interest theory."
menu_book Capital and Interest
Read Full Quotemenu_book Capital and Interest
Böhm-Bawerk's monumental three-volume work establishing the Austrian theory of capital and interest. He demolishes all prior theories of interest (exploitation, productivity, abstinence) before constructing his own: interest arises from the...
View Bookmenu_book The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines
Landmark work in which Jevons examined Britain's dependence on coal and argued that improvements in fuel efficiency would not reduce consumption but instead increase it, a principle now known as...
View Book"In the economic sphere, an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects unfold only subsequently; they are not seen. Between a bad and a good economist, this is the whole difference: one confines himself to the visible effect; the other takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."
menu_book That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen
Read Full Quote"If there is one well-established truth in political economy, it is this: That in all cases, for all commodities that serve to provide for the tangible or intangible needs of the consumer, it is in the consumer's best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and of trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price."
menu_book Evenings on Saint-Lazare Street
Read Full Quotemenu_book Evenings on Saint-Lazare Street
A series of Socratic dialogues in the style of Bastiat, Molinari's contemporary and colleague, in which an economist, a conservative, and a socialist debate the foundations of political economy. Molinari...
View Bookmenu_book The Production of Security
Molinari's short but explosive 1849 essay, the first systematic argument that security and defense, like any other commodity, should be produced by competing private firms on the free market rather...
View Book"The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it."
menu_book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Read Full Quote"Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct."
menu_book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Read Full Quote"A thing is worth as much as it can be sold for without fraud or coercion. The value of goods is not determined by their intrinsic nature, but by the estimation which men commonly put upon them, and this estimation varies with time, place, and circumstance."
menu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Read Full Quote"If a merchant knows that goods will soon be cheaper in a particular place, or that supply will increase, he is not obliged to inform buyers of this. It is not unjust to sell at the current market price, since the price is set by common estimation, not by future conditions."
menu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Read Full Quote"When buyers and sellers are free to act, and neither fraud nor force is present, the price that results from their voluntary agreement is just, for justice in commerce consists in the freedom of exchange, not in the equality of the things exchanged."
menu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Read Full Quotemenu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Luis de Molina's six-volume masterwork on justice and law, completed in 1593. Molina's most enduring economic contribution is his clear formulation of subjective value theory: that the just price of...
View Book"A sum of money today is worth more than the same sum to be received in the future. This is not only the common estimation of men, but is grounded in reason: present goods are available for present needs; future goods must be awaited, and in the meantime their possession is uncertain."
menu_book Comentario Resolutorio de Cambios (Commentary on Exchange)
Read Full Quote"We see by experience that in France, where money is scarcer than in Spain, bread, wine, cloth, and labour are worth much less. And even in Spain, before the discovery of the Indies, goods and labour were much cheaper than they are today, for the reason that there was then much less money."
menu_book Comentario Resolutorio de Cambios (Commentary on Exchange)
Read Full Quote"In countries where money is plentiful, all other things being equal, a greater quantity of money is given for goods and services than where money is scarce. Whence it follows that money itself, like any other commodity, is worth more where it is scarce than where it is abundant."
menu_book Comentario Resolutorio de Cambios (Commentary on Exchange)
Read Full Quotemenu_book Comentario Resolutorio de Cambios (Commentary on Exchange)
Martín de Azpilcueta's 1556 treatise on monetary exchange, containing the earliest clear statement of what would become the quantity theory of money. Azpilcueta observed that in countries where money is...
View Book"To sell below the just price is loss to the seller; to buy above it is loss to the buyer. The prince cannot without injustice compel men to sell below the common price, for this is to force them to give what is theirs to others without compensation."
menu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Read Full Quote"The just price of things is not determined by the nature or quality of things in themselves, but by the common estimation of men, that is, by what buyers and sellers commonly agree to give and receive in exchange."
menu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Read Full Quotemenu_book De Iustitia et Iure (On Justice and Law)
Domingo de Soto's systematic treatment of justice and law, published in 1553. Soto develops a rigorous natural law analysis of property rights, the just price, usury, and commercial ethics. His...
View Book