Economics and Public Policy

[Presented at the 2008 Rothbard Graduate Seminar. 28 minutes.]

Free societies would have few economists - mainly educators. But, when government - or any other agency using violence - intervenes in the market, the usefulness of the economist expands. The problems become what the consequences of governmental acts will be.

Bad policies - like Welfare Economics and Social Economics -were often supported simply because there was so little understanding of economics, at all. There are no mathematical constants in Austrian economics. They are qualitative not quantitative. A table sums up the differences between The Market Principle and The Hegemonic Principle.

An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 1357-1369 in the Scholar’s Edition of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State.