This address was delivered before the University Club of New York, April 18, 1950.

Introduction

The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism and communism is that the market economy or capitalism is a system that hurts the vital interests of the immense majority of people for the sole benefit of a small minority of rugged individualists. It condemns the masses to progressing impoverishment. It brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites.

This doctrine was not the work of Karl Marx. It had been developed long before Marx entered the scene. Its most successful propagators were not the Marxian authors, but such men as Carlyle and Ruskin, the British Fabians, the German professors and the American Institutionalists. And it is a very significant fact that the correctness of this dogma was contested only by a few economists who were very soon silenced and barred from access to the universities, the press, the leadership of political parties and, first of all, public office. Public opinion by and large accepted the condemnation of capitalism without any reservation.

The student of economics is invariably taught a certain mythology about the history of the study of business cycles. That mythology holds (a) that before 1913, nobody realized that there are cycles of prosperity and depression in the economy—instead, everyone thought only of isolated crises or panics, and (b) that this all changed with the advent of Wesley Mitchell’s Business Cycles in 1913.

Mitchell’s supposed achievement was to see that there are booms and then depressions, and that these cycles of activity stem from mysterious processes deep within the capitalist system. It is Part III of this work (the other parts being out-dated historical and statistical material) that is here reprinted for the second time, this time in paperback.

It is certainly true that the late Wesley Mitchell had an enormous influence on all later studies of the business cycle and that he revolutionized that branch of economics. But the true nature of this revolution is almost unknown. For there had been great economists who were not only aware of, but also discovered theories to explain, the dread phenomena of boom and bust. They did this much before Mitchell’s time, and went far beyond him.

This article was first published in Vol. 18, Number 5 of The Free Market.

It was a revolting display to see the bureaucrats at the Justice Department cheer Federal Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's decision. Many of these people didn't even know how to get around the web twelve months ago, and now they are making decisions for millions of consumers and threatening to smash the company that democratized information. The government, driven by power-lust and fueled by the envy of Microsoft's competitors, is happy to jam a crowbar into the wheel of commerce.

Some old-time conservatives had a soft spot for antitrust laws. They believed in free enterprise, but made exceptions for interventions that curb the activities of corporations. In this, they are joined today by free-market economists of the Chicago School: critical of the way antitrust laws have been applied, but stopping short of demanding their repeal.

Yet it has never been clearer that antitrust is exactly what the economists of the Austrian School have always claimed: a political weapon that accomplishes no social good and imposes much social harm. Exhibit A is, of course, the absurd Microsoft case, in which the government is attacking a wonderful company on technical issues now years out of date.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. During 45 years of research and writing, in 25 books and thousands of articles, he battled every destructive trend in this century -- socialism, statism, relativism, and scientism -- and awakened a passion for freedom in thousands of scholars, journalists, and activists. 

Teaching in New York, Las Vegas, Auburn, and at conferences around the world, Rothbard led the renaissance of the Austrian School of economics. He galvanized an academic and popular fight for liberty and property, against the omnipotent state and its court intellectuals. 

Volumes one and two of his magisterial history of economic thought appeared just after his death, published by Edward Elgar. Whereas other texts pretend to an uninterrupted march toward higher levels of truth, Rothbard illuminated a history of unknown geniuses and lost knowledge, of respected charlatans and honored fallacies. A large collection of Rothbard's best scholarly articles appears later this year in the publisher's "Economists of the Century" series. In addition, there are unpublished manuscripts, articles, and letters to fill many more volumes. 

This article was first published in Vol. 29, Number 1 of The Free Market - January 2005.

Should economics be pursued as a profession or a vocation? The choice isn’t about the job title of a particular economist or what tasks he or she fulfills in the course of a day’s work. It is about the motivation behind the work and the subjective orientation one brings to the task. The choice tends to dictate whether an economist will serve the cause of truth and freedom, or waste his or her talents on convenience, ephemera, and statism.

Think about the word "vocation" as a work or function to which a person is called that requires dedication to an idea. A vocation involves what Ludwig von Mises called "introversive" labor while a profession involves "extroversive" labor.  The essence of introversive labor is work undertaken solely for its own sake and not as a means to a more remote end. Extroversive labor, in contrast, is performed because the individual "prefers the proceeds he can earn by working to the disutility of labor and the pleasure of leisure."

A cartel is an organization made up of senior managers or their representatives in an industry.