Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship: Mises, Hayek, & Schumpeter

Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship: Mises, Hayek, & Schumpeter

Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship: Mises, Hayek, & SchumpterCategory:Business - Home BusinessDescription:Devoted to exalting heroic Austrian Economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, and F.A. Hayek and entrepreneurship.

Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship
The Greatest Investment Autumn, 2008
by Dr. Elliot McGucken

Entrepreneurship cannot be taught. But in no way does this mean there is nothing to teach in a class devoted to entrepreneurship. We must teach of liberty's ideals and the precepts underlying our precious, exalted freedom. We must battle for the soul of capitalism; and this has ever been done best by those brave men who acquainted themselves with the classics' immortal ideals in books written pages, and then took rugged action in rendeirng those ideals real in living ventures, as did our Founding Fathers.

Thus a class devoted to Entreprneurship--to the supposed bottom line--is actually a class devoted to the higher ideals. And so it is that I flipped the script on the modern university, by sneaking the Great Books back onto the debt-based campus in a Trojan Horse called The Hero's Journey in Arts Entreprenuership & Technology.

"The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail" --Joseph Schumpeter

"What warrants success in a fight for freedom and civilization is not merely material equipment but first of all the spirit that animates those handling the weapons. This heroic spirit cannot be bought by inflation." --Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 469

"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders." --Ludwig von Mises

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law. --Hayek

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible.Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. --F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967)

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. --F.A. Hayek

Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle . . . of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn. --Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, p. 71 Keynes

A work of art is an attempt to experience the universe as a whole. One cannot analyze or dissect it into parts and comment on it without destroying its intrinsic character. --Ludwig von Mises

Economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen. --Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 282 Coercion

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them. --Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 311 p. 314

Ludwig von Mises --"An entrepreneur cannot be trained." Human Action p. 311 p. 314

Ludwig von Mises The creative spirit innovates necessarily. It must press forward. It must destroy the old and set the new in its place.. Progress cannot be organized. --Ludwig von Mises, Socialism p. 167 Genius

One cannot organize or institutionalize the emergence of new ideas. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science Ludwig von Mises p. 129 Ideas

A nation cannot prosper if its members are not fully aware of the fact that what alone can improve their conditions is more and better production. And this can only be brought about by increased saving and capital accumulation. Planning for Freedom pp. 92-93 Material Well-Being --Ludwig von Mises

The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry.... Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still under a liberal regime. --F.A. Hayek

In the etatist state entrepreneurs are at the mercy of officialdom. Officials enjoy discretion to decide questions on which the existence of every firm depends. They are practically free to ruin any entrepreneur they want to. They had the power not only to silence these objectors but even to force them to contribute to the party funds of nationalism. --Mises

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. --Thomas Jefferson in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. --Mises

Individualism resulted in the fall of autocratic government, the establishment of democracy, the evolution of capitalism, technical improvements, and an unprecedented rise in standards of living. It substituted enlightenment for old superstitions, scientific methods of research for inveterate prejudices. --Mises

It was in the climate created by this capitalistic system of individualism that all the modern intellectual achievements thrived. --Mises

"The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not." --F.A. Hayek

"Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow." --Ludwig Von Mises

"[Socialists] promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office." --Ludwig Von Mises

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. --Ludwig von Mises, Government and Civil Society

"Economics deals with society's fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen." --Ludwig von Mises

"Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process." --F.A. Hayek

"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide. Conversation at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (9 February 1978); published in A Conversation with Friedrich A. Von Hayek: Science and Socialism (1979)" --F.A. Hayek

"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants." --F.A. Hayek, Nobel Lecture of December 11, 1974, The Pretence of Knowledge



Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship: Mises, Hayek, & Schumpeter

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