This paper challenges the recent research of public interest historians and argues the evidence supports a public choice interpretation of the 1906 Meat Inspection Act. First, the Beef Trust’s slaughter of diseased meat was due to the uncertainty over the science of disease transmission and...

“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” -John Godfrey Saxe, 1869 (Shapiro 2008) Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between government intervention and the Chicago Beef Trust in the late 19th and early 20th century up to the...

"[C]oncentration on a single firm and the reaction of its owner is not the appropriate route to the theory of production; on the contrary, it is likely to be misleading…In the current literature, this preoccupation with the single firm rather than with the interrelatedness of firms in the...

This paper analyzes the two main divergent interpretations of Federal Reserve monetary policy in the 1920s, the expansionary view described by Rothbard (2008a [1963]) and earlier “Austrian” writers, and the contractionary view most notably held by Friedman & Schwartz (1993 [1963]) and later...

This paper analyzes the period 1867-79 in American economic history from an "Austrian" perspective. The post-Civil War boom, the Panic of 1873, and the subsequent downturn are investigated in light of Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) and its structure of production framework. This paper...

This paper investigates the background behind the United States' National Banking System (1863-1913) and develops a special interest account for its passage. It first argues that an important relationship, the Chase-Cooke connection between Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and Philadelphia...

This paper discusses the consequences of John Maynard Keynes for the science of political economy, or the fields of economics, economic policy, and politics. It argues that the consequences of Keynes in all three fields were negative and resulted in a significant retrogression. For economics, a...

A vital part of urban progressivism, as shall be seen further below, was a frenetic attack on the ‘corruption' of politicians . . . (Rothbard 2017, 285). The Progressive Era, written by Murray Rothbard and edited by the present writer, was recently published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute...

This paper examines the American post-WW1 boom and bust. It finds that the Federal Reserve's monetary easing from 1919-1920 created an Austrian Business Cycle (ABC), or an unsustainable credit boom. The collapse of the boom initiated the Depression of 1920-1921. The subsequent laissez faire...

This paper critiques the Keynesian liquidity trap from an Austrian perspective. The liquidity trap theory argues that at a given interest rate the demand for money is horizontal, and interest rates cannot fall to stimulate investment. The major problem in the theory is that it concentrates on...