Amid all the crying of higher gas price, economic stagnation and potential inflation all over the world, there is a map clearly indicate how much more productivity has leaped head over shoulder in the last two hundred years: Global GDP indicator over the long run, data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries. And newly released data show poverty rate dropped to historical low on Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate Using the Official Poverty Measure: 1959 to 2025 . And Medium Household Income has increased to $87460. Growth may be flatten out a little bit, but we are still on the way.
Young people these days got used to taking elevators instead of step by step climbing the ladder. The American founding father Benjamin Franklin became prominent after years of self-taught intellectual training since a kid. The Father of French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, came from a very poor family. His mother died soon after his birth. Since his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy) and France. Today many young adults tend to lose patience with many unmet desires, easily complaining about things developed too slow, too little.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995)’s voluminous work: Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, took him more than seven years to complete. The 2nd Edition includes a introduction by Joseph T. Salerno, who view Rothbard’ stance “the pure libertarian position… anarcho-capitalism.” The captivating new introduction by Professor Joseph Salerno in 2009 that frames up the Rothbardian contribution in a completely new way, and reassesses the place of this book in the history of economic thought. As a child, Salerno observed his “New Deal Democrat” father’s disdain for a visiting relative from Italy who had declared himself a member of the Italian Communist Party. Salerno said that following the incident, he became a supporter of Barry Goldwater‘s 1964 presidential candidacy and a “full-fledged Goldwaterite.” Later an article by Rothbard led Salerno into study Austrian School of Economics.
Rothbard began work on this magnum opus on January 1, 1952. And on May 5, 1959 Rothbard wrote to his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, informing him, “E finito!” The more than seven years that it took Rothbard to complete the book elapsed during, what was up to that time, one of the most sterile and retrogressive decades in the history of scientific economics, dating back to the birth of the science in the systematic treatise of Richard Cantillon (Essay on the Nature of Trade in General) published in 1755.
In this fundamental work, Rothbard provides a sweeping presentation of Austrian economic theory, a reconstruction of many aspects of that theory, a rigorous criticism of alternative schools, and an inspiring look at a science of liberty that concerns nearly everything and should concern everyone. He elaborates a unified and systematic treatment of the structure of production, the theory of capital and interest, factor pricing, rent theory, and the role of entrepreneurship in production. Furthermore, production theory is presented as part of the core of economic analysis and covers five of the book;s twelve chapters and approximately 30 percent of its text. One of Rothbard’s greatest accomplishments in production theory was the development of a capital and interest theory that integrated the temporal production-structure analysis of Knut Wicksell and hayek with the pure-time-preference theory expounded by Frank A. Fetter and Ludwig von Mises.
A right-libertarian, Rothbard was a critic of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Adam Smith. Rothbard opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women’s voting and activism for the growth of the welfare state. Since I had heard so much Jews argued about their tribal suffering during Holocaust of WWII, so I am again quite at awe here to find there is a public intellectual Jew out there that promoted historical revisionism and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. So we surely should not stereotype people. Life is always full of up and down, perspective certainly opens us for considerable more rooms for development and growth by overcoming the stifled old self.