In Rothbard’s Opinion, Lionel Robbins’s Book Is Unquestionably the BEST Work on the Great Depression

Lionel Robbins’s The Great Depression is one of the great economic works of our time. Its greatness lies not so much in originality of economic thought, as in the application of the best economic thought to the explanation of the cataclysmic phenomena of the Great Depression. This is unquestionably the best work published on the Great Depression.

At the time that Robbins wrote this work, he was perhaps the second most eminent follower of Ludwig von Mises (Hayek being the first). To his work, Robbins brought a clarity and polish of style that I believe to be unequalled among any economists, past or present. Robbins is the premier economic stylist.

In this brief, clear, but extremely meaty book, Robbins sets forth first the Misesian theory of business cycles and then applies it to the events of the 1920s and 1930s. We see how bank credit expansion in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries drove the civilized world into a great depression.⁶²

Then Robbins shows how the various nations took measures to counteract and cushion the depression that could only make it worse: propping up unsound, shaky business positions; inflating credit; expanding public works; keeping up wage rates (e.g., Hoover and his White House conferences)—all things that prolonged the necessary depression adjustments and profoundly aggravated the catastrophe. Robbins is particularly bitter about the wave of tariffs, exchange controls, quotas, etc. that prolonged crises, set nation against nation, and fragmented the international division of labor.

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⁶²In Britain the expansion was generated because of the rigid wage structure caused by unions and the unemployment insurance system, as well as a return to the gold standard at too high a par; and in the United States it was generated by a desire to inflate in order to help Britain, as well as an absurd devotion to the ideal of a stable price level.

—Murray N. Rothbard, Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard, ed. David Gordon (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 289-290.

According to Rothbard, Sir Ralph George Hawtrey Was One of the Evil Geniuses of the 1920s

Executive director and operating head of the Association with such formidable backing was Norman Lombard, brought in by Fisher in 1926. The Association spread its gospel far and wide. It was helped by the publicity given to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford’s proposal for a “commodity dollar” in 1922 and 1923. Other prominent stabilizationists in this period were professors George F. Warren and Frank Pearson of Cornell, Royal Meeker, Hudson B. Hastings, Alvin Hansen, and Lionel D. Edie. In Europe, in addition to the above mentioned, advocates of stable money included: Professor Arthur C. Pigou, Ralph G. Hawtrey, J.R. Bellerby, R.A. Lehfeldt, G.M. Lewis, Sir Arthur Salter, Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Arthur Kitson, Sir Frederick Soddy, F.W. Pethick-Lawrence, Reginald McKenna, Sir Basil Blackett, and John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was particularly influential in his propaganda for a “managed currency” and a stabilized price level, as set forth in his A Tract on Monetary Reform, published in 1923.

Ralph Hawtrey proved to be one of the evil geniuses of the 1920s. An influential economist in a land where economists have shaped policy far more influentially than in the United States, Hawtrey, Director of Financial Studies at the British Treasury, advocated international credit control by Central Banks to achieve a stable price level as early as 1913. In 1919, Hawtrey was one of the first to call for the adoption of a gold-exchange standard by European countries, tying it in with international Central Bank cooperation. Hawtrey was one of the prime European trumpeters of the prowess of Governor Benjamin Strong. Writing in 1932, at a time when Robertson had come to realize the evils of stabilization, Hawtrey declared: “The American experiment in stabilization from 1922 to 1928 showed that an early treatment could check a tendency either to inflation or to depression. . . . The American experiment was a great advance upon the practice of the nineteenth century,” when the trade cycle was accepted passively. When Governor Strong died, Hawtrey called the event “a disaster for the world.” Finally, Hawtrey was the main inspiration for the stabilization resolutions of the Genoa Conference of 1922.

—Murray N. Rothbard, America's Great Depression, 5th ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000), 176-177.

Government CANNOT Act in the General Interest When It Controls the Supply of Money

Yet even if we assumed that government could know what should be done about the supply of money in the general interest, it is highly unlikely that it would be able to act in that manner. As Professor Eckstein, in the article quoted above, concludes from his experience in advising governments:

Governments are not able to live by the rules even if they were to adopt the philosophy [of providing a stable framework].

Once governments are given the power to benefit particular groups or sections of the population, the mechanism of majority government forces them to use it to gain the support of a sufficient number of them to command a majority. The constant temptation to meet local or sectional dissatisfaction by manipulating the quantity of money so that more can be spent on services for those clamouring for assistance will often be irresistible. Such expenditure is not an appropriate remedy but necessarily upsets the proper functioning of the market. 

—F. A. Hayek, “The Denationalization of Money: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 6, Good Money, Part II: The Standard, ed. Stephen Kresge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 203.

Today, Money Is NOT an Effective Medium of Exchange, But a Tool of Government for Fleecing Us and for “Managing” the Economy

In fact, in endeavouring to design a better monetary order we at once encounter the difficulty of not really knowing what we want. What would be a really good money? To the present day, money is that part of the market order that government has not allowed to find its most effective form, and on which silly rulers and economists have doctored most. Yet it was not economists or statesmen who invented the market, though some have come to understand it a little; nor is it our present knowledge which can show us the best solutions, but the discoveries made by free experimentation. Those who chiefly needed money as an indispensable tool of trade, and who had first discovered it as a means for making most trade possible, were soon forced to use what money government gave them. And government jealously guarded its monopoly for quite different purposes than those for which money had been introduced. Today, money is not mainly an effective medium of exchange, but chiefly a tool of government for fleecing us and for ‘managing’ the economy. The result is that we are obliged to admit that we have little empirical evidence of how the various conceivable methods of supplying money would operate, and almost none about which kind of money the public would select if it had an opportunity to choose freely between several different and clearly distinguishable kinds of money. For this we must rely largely on our theoretical imagination, and try to apply to a special problem that understanding of the functioning of competition which we have gained elsewhere.

—F. A. Hayek, “The Future Unit of Value,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 6, Good Money, Part II: The Standard, ed. Stephen Kresge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 240-241.

Gustav Cassel’s Fear of a Gold Shortage and His Stabilization Views Led to the Gold Exchange Standard and Cooperation Between Central Banks

The second important factor which determined the development of ideas on monetary policy was that the above-mentioned facts were partly contributory to the extraordinary influence exercised by two particular representatives of the mechanistic Quantity Theory of Money and the concept of a systematic stabilization of the price level, Irving Fisher and Gustav Cassel. The fluctuations in the value of money mentioned above necessarily aroused wide interest in Fisher’s proposal for stabilizing the value of gold, which he had been advocating for a long time; and the lively propaganda which was being circulated, particularly by the Stable Money Association which he had founded, had succeeded in making the concept of price stabilization as the objective of monetary policy into a virtually unassailable dogma. Cassel, who deserved the greatest credit for the stabilization of European currencies, contributed a further, extraordinarily effective argument in favour of the policy of stabilization, the influence of which upon actual developments it is impossible to overestimate. 

This was his prediction that gold production was not adequate for the annual increase of 3 per cent in the world stock of monetary gold which, on his calculations, would be required to maintain stability in the price level. 

Fear of the imminent shortage of gold, and the desire to arrive at a systematic policy for stabilizing the value of money, gave rise to two further ideas which dominated the period, and were expressed particularly in the resolutions of the conference on international economic relations in Genoa in 1922; a preference for the gold exchange standard as the object of stabilization in individual countries, and the recommendation of “Cooperation between Central Banks.” Both desires were to become extremely significant for the development of monetary policy over the next few years. Perhaps it is therefore appropriate at this point to also name the man who acquired special influence as the propagator of the ideas expressed by the Genoa Conference—even if he were not, as one might suspect, its instigator: R. G. Hawtrey of the British Treasury. 

—F. A. Hayek, “The Fate of the Gold Standard,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 5, Good Money, Part I: The New World, ed. Stephen Kresge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 154.

To Combat the Depression by a Forced Credit Expansion Is to Attempt to Cure the Evil by the Very Means Which Brought It About

It seems certain, however, that we shall merely make matters worse if we aim at curing the deflationary symptoms and, at the same time (by the erection of trade barriers and other forms of state intervention), do our best to increase rather than to decrease the fundamental maladjustments. More than that: while the advantages of such a course are, to say the least, uncertain, the new dangers it creates are great. To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection—a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end. It would not be the first experiment of this kind that has been made. We should merely be repeating, on a much larger scale, the course followed by the Federal Reserve System in 1927, an experiment that Mr. A.C. Miller, the only economist on the Federal Reserve Board and at the same time its oldest member, has rightly characterized as “the greatest and boldest operation ever undertaken by the Federal Reserve System,” an operation that “resulted in one of the most costly errors committed by it or any other banking system in the last 75 years.” It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression. We must not forget that, for the last six or eight years, monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.

—F. A. Hayek, “Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle,” in Prices and Production and Other Works: F. A. Hayek on Money, the Business Cycle, and the Gold Standard, ed. Joseph T. Salerno (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 6-7.

It Was the Political Inability to Make That Choice That Led to the Debacle of the 1930s

The return of a universal gold standard would once again place money beyond the control of individual central banks. At that point, central bankers would once again have to choose between domestic monetary policy and the stability of the foreign exchange rate. It was the political inability to make that choice that led to the debacle of the 1930s. In his article “The Fate of the Gold Standard”, which appears as chapter 3, this volume, Hayek accused Keynes of the primary responsibility for the belief that the choice could be evaded. However, it was not only Keynes, but the whole of the economic literature devoted to the concept of the trade cycle that encouraged the belief that somehow or other the cycle could be minimized through monetary policy.

—Stephen Kresge, ed., editor’s introduction to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 5, Good Money, Part I: The New World, by F. A. Hayek (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 14.

It Was Keynes’s Use of Aggregates that Hayek Came to View as Being Keynes’s MOST DANGEROUS Contribution

 Both “The Economics of the 1930s as Seen from London” and “Personal Recollections of Keynes and the Keynesian Revolution” were written in the 1960s. In them, Hayek recounted that after the release of The General Theory he had a feeling, vague but enduring, that in order to do a full critique of Keynes he would need to do more than to criticize his model. Hayek disagreed with Keynes on both theory and policy. But it was Keynes’s methodological approach, specifically his use of aggregates, that Hayek came to view in retrospect as being his opponent’s most dangerous contribution. 

Now, it is easy to understand that Hayek might put things in this way in essays written in the 1960s. Macroeconomic modelling was then at its zenith, as was hubris about the economics profession’s ability to control the business cycle by applying fiscal ‘fine-tuning’. What doesn’t ring quite true in Hayek’s claim is that he was only vaguely becoming aware of this difference over methodology in the 1930s. As we saw in our discussion of Hayek’s earlier work on the United States economy, opposition to the use of statistical aggregates has long been a methodological principle among Austrians. Aggregates mask the movement of relative prices, and relative price movements are the central foci of Austrian theory.

—Bruce Caldwell, ed., editor’s introduction to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 9, Contra Keynes and Cambridge: Essays, Correspondence, by F. A. Hayek (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 42-43.

Hayek Secured the Capital-Theoretic Foundation of Austrian Theory By Replacing “Average Period of Production” with the “Structure of Production”

 By the time that Hayek published his next major theoretical work, The Pure Theory of Capital, the world was at war. Few in the profession even noticed the book. Furthermore, it was clear to Hayek that even after a prodigious effort he had not gotten very far. True enough, he had been able to clear away Böhm-Bawerk’s “average period of production” and replace it with the far more complex notion of a structure of production, thereby securing the capital-theoretic foundation of Austrian theory. But he had made no further progress towards building on this new foundation a fully dynamic theory of the cycle. Hayek never returned to this task, hoping that it would be completed by others. It remains unfinished.

—Bruce Caldwell, ed., editor’s introduction to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 9, Contra Keynes and Cambridge: Essays, Correspondence, by F. A. Hayek (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 42.

Monetary Theories of the Trade Cycle Are Generally Regarded as “Exogenous” (Instead of “Endogenous”) Theories

If we are to understand the present status of monetary theories of the trade cycle, we must pay special attention to the assumptions upon which they are based. At the present day, monetary theories are generally regarded as falling within the class of so-called “exogenous” theories, i.e., theories that look for the cause of the cycle not in the interconnections of economic phenomena themselves but in external interferences. Now it is, no doubt, often a waste of time to discuss the merits of classifying a theory in a given category. But the question of classification becomes important when the inclusion of a theory in one class or another implies, at the same time, a judgment as to the sphere of validity of the theory in question. This is undoubtedly the case with the distinction, very general today, between endogenous and exogenous theories—a distinction introduced into economic literature some twenty years ago by Bouniatian. Endogenous theories, in the course of their proof, avoid making use of assumptions that cannot either be decided by purely economic considerations, or regarded as general characteristics of our economic system—and hence capable of general proof. Exogenous theories, on the other hand, are based on concrete assertions whose correctness has to be proved separately in each individual case. As compared with an endogenous theory, which, if logically sound, can in a sense lay claim to general validity, an exogenous theory is at some disadvantage, inasmuch as it has, in each case, to justify the assumptions on which its conclusions are based.

Now as far as most contemporary monetary theories of the cycle are concerned, their opponents are undoubtedly right in classifying them, as does Professor Lowe in his discussion of the theories of Professors Mises and Hahn, among the exogenous theories; for they begin with arbitrary interferences on the part of the banks. This is, perhaps, one of the main reasons for the prevailing skepticism concerning the value of such theories. A theory that has to call upon the deus ex machina of a false step by bankers, in order to reach its conclusions is, perhaps, inevitably suspect. Yet Professor Mises himself—who is certainly to be regarded as the most respected and consistent exponent of the monetary theory of the trade cycle in Germany—has, in his latest work, afforded ample justification for this view of his theory by attributing the periodic recurrence of the trade cycle to the general tendency of central banks to depress the money rate of interest below the natural rate.

—F. A. Hayek, “The Fundamental Cause of Cyclical Fluctuations,” in Prices and Production and Other Works: F. A. Hayek on Money, the Business Cycle, and the Gold Standard, ed. Joseph T. Salerno (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 75-76. 

The Pressure for More and Cheaper Money Is a Political Force Which Monetary Authorities Have NEVER Been Able to Resist

The pressure for more and cheaper money is an ever-present political force which monetary authorities have never been able to resist, unless they were in a position credibly to point to an absolute obstacle which made it impossible for them to meet such demands. And it will become even more irresistible when these interests can appeal to an increasingly unrecognizable image of St. Maynard. There will be no more urgent need than to erect new defences against the onslaughts of popular forms of Keynesianism, that is, to replace or restore those restraints which, under the influence of his theory, have been systematically dismantled. It was the main function of the gold standard, of balanced budgets, and of the limitation of the supply of ‘international liquidity’, to make it impossible for the monetary authorities to capitulate to the pressure for more money. And it was exactly for that reason that all these safeguards against inflation, which had made it possible for representative governments to resist the demands of powerful pressure groups for more money, have been removed at the instigation of economists who imagined that, if governments were released from the shackles of mechanical rules, they would be able to act wisely for the general benefit. 

—F. A. Hayek, “Choice in Currency,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 6, Good Money, Part II: The Standard, ed. Stephen Kresge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 119-120.

Should We Rely on the Price Mechanism to Provide Us with an Indicator of the Relative Scarcity of the Various Factors of Production?

In discussions of war economics it is generally taken for granted that the monetary authorities should always employ all the means at their disposal to keep rates of interest as low as possible. That it is possible to postpone a threatened rise of interest rates for a long time cannot be doubted. The real problem is whether it is desirable to do so. For nearly two hundred years economists fought fairly consistently against the popular argument in favour of such a policy; and until two or three years ago, when these old arguments experienced a sudden recrudescence, it was commonly regarded as highly dangerous. For the time being the prompt rise of the Bank Rate at the outbreak of war has provided a temporary answer. But with the infinitely greater demands for capital during actual warfare the problem is bound to return in much more acute and pressing form. 

Basically, the question at issue is the same as that discussed in the article on pricing versus rationing in the last issue of The Banker. Should we rely on the price mechanism to provide us with an indicator of the relative scarcity of the various factors of production? Or should we deliberately make this price mechanism inoperative and try to substitute for it a detailed regulation of all productive activity by a central authority? And the argument that the rate of interest should be allowed to express the real scarcity of capital is fundamentally the same as that with respect to any other price. But this similarity was never easy to see, since in the case of capital we have not to deal with a single concrete resource but with a somewhat abstract concept. And the more recent discussions, confining themselves entirely to the monetary influences at work, hardly have increased the understanding of this problem.

—F. A. Hayek, “The Economy of Capital,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 10, Socialism and War: Essays, Documents, Reviews, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997), 157.

Every Explanation of Economic Crises MUST Include the Assumption that Entrepreneurs Have Committed Errors

Every explanation of economic crises must include the assumption that entrepreneurs have committed errors. But the mere fact that entrepreneurs do make errors can hardly be regarded as a sufficient explanation of crises. Erroneous dispositions which lead to losses all round will appear probable only if we can show why entrepreneurs should all simultaneously make mistakes in the same direction. The explanation that this is just due to a kind of psychological infection or that for any other reason most entrepreneurs should commit the same avoidable errors of judgment does not carry much conviction. It seems, however, more likely that they may all be equally misled by following guides or symptoms which as a rule prove reliable. Or, speaking more concretely, it may be that the prices existing when they made their decisions and on which they had to base their views about the future have created expectations which must necessarily be disappointed. In this case we might have to distinguish between what we may call justified errors, caused by the price system, and sheer errors about the course of external events. Although I have no time to discuss this further, I may mention that there is probably a close connection between this distinction and the traditional distinction between ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ theories of the trade cycle.

—F. A. Hayek, “Price Expectations, Monetary Disturbances, and Malinvestments,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 5, Good Money, Part I: The New World, ed. Stephen Kresge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 235-236.

An Elaboration of the Theory of Capital Is a Prerequisite for a Thorough Disposal of Keynes’s Argument

I ought to explain why I failed to return to the charge after I had devoted much time to a careful analysis of his writings—a failure for which I have reproached myself ever since. It was not merely (as I have occasionally claimed) the inevitable disappointment of a young man when told by the famous author that his objections did not matter since Keynes no longer believed in his own arguments. Nor was it really that I became aware that an effective refutation of Keynes’s conclusions would have to deal with the whole macroeconomic approach. It was rather that his disregard of what seemed to me the crucial problems made me recognize that a proper critique would have to deal more with what Keynes had not gone into than with what he had discussed, and that in consequence an elaboration of the still inadequately developed theory of capital was a prerequisite for a thorough disposal of Keynes’s argument. 

So I started on this task intending it to lead to a discussion of the determinants of investment in a monetary system. But the preliminary ‘pure’ part of this work proved to be much more difficult, and took me very much longer, than I had expected. When war broke out, making it doubtful that publication of such a voluminous work would be possible, I put out as a separate book what had been meant as a first step of an analysis of the Keynesian weaknesses, which itself was indefinitely postponed.⁷

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⁷F. A. Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital

—F. A. Hayek, “The Keynes Centenary: The Austrian Critique,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 9, Contra Keynes and Cambridge: Essays, Correspondence, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 251-252.

Economic Phenomena Are NOT Mass Phenomena of the Kind to Which Statistical Theory Is Applicable

The hope of becoming more ‘empirical’ by becoming more macroeconomic is bound to be disappointed, because these statistical magnitudes—which are alone ascertainable by ‘measurement’—do not also make them significant as the cause of actions of individuals who do not know them. Economic phenomena are not mass phenomena of the kind to which statistical theory is applicable. They belong to that intermediate sphere that lies between the simple phenomena of which people can ascertain all the relevant data and the true mass phenomena where one must rely on probabilities. 

—F. A. Hayek, “The Keynes Centenary: The Austrian Critique,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 9, Contra Keynes and Cambridge: Essays, Correspondence, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 251.

Léon Walras Was Hired as a Professor of Economics in Lausanne Because, and Not in spite of, His Socialism

Walras, born in 1834, was the son of Auguste Walras (1801-1866), an amateur economist who favored a utility and scarcity value theory and agreed with James Mill about the desirability of the nationalization of land. Léon Walras borrowed the important elements of pure and social economics from his father but his analytical method belongs only to him. Nevertheless, the beginnings of Walras’s career were not easy. As a supernumerary pupil at the Paris Ecoles des Mines, he never got a degree and became, for his first job, a kind of secretary in a railway company. From 1864 to 1870 he devoted himself to the cooperative sector and wrote some of his most important pieces in social economy. He did not begin to lay the foundations of his mathematical economics until 1871, when he took the new chair of political economy just created in the same Vaud Canton which had honored Proudhon. Walras’s pure and social economies are not, however, unrelated. Besides, Walras was hired as a professor of economics in Lausanne because, and not in spite of, his socialism. Walras spent the rest of his life in Switzerland. Although he never managed to get a chair of economics in France, which he craved for many years, he lived long enough (until 1910) to contemplate the triumph of neoclassical economics and to enjoy the prestige of his own pure theory among a growing number of young disciples.

—Michel Herland, “Three French Socialist Economists: Leroux, Proudhon, Walras,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 18, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 134-135. 

The Kornai–Lipták Two-Level Planning Idea Is Very Much Reminiscent of the Taylor–Lange Market Socialist Models

As noted above, Kornai’s earlier ‘‘critiques’’ of socialism were very much half-hearted in that, although they sought to bring a larger part of the socialist economy within the purview of markets or ‘‘quasi-markets,’’ they still saw a significant and important role for state ownership and central planning of the economy. One of Kornai’s most well-known contributions to this area was ‘‘Two-Level Planning,’’ which he coauthored with Tamás Lipták, who did the mathematical modeling in the paper (Kornai & Lipták, 1965). This work extended previous work Kornai conducted with Lipták, which used mathematical methods to tackle various aspects of efficient planning under market socialist type arrangements.

The Kornai–Lipták two-level planning idea is very much reminiscent of the Taylor–Lange market socialist models described 30–35 years earlier in the throws [throes] of the early stages of the socialist calculation debate with Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (see, for instance, Lange, 1936; Taylor, 1929). The Taylor–Lange model worked as follows: let there be a market in consumer goods and labor but leave the means of production in government’s hands. The central planning office will set prices for producer goods and on the basis of these ‘‘accounting prices’’ producers will be instructed to set price equal to marginal cost and to combine resources in such a way as to minimize average cost. Of course, the initial administered prices will be wrong. At these non-equilibrium prices some goods will sit unpurchased; for others there will be excess demand. The resulting shortages and surpluses will signal to planners how they need to modify prices to bring the economy into equilibrium. Through trial and error the planners will engage in a kind of Walrasian auctioneer tattonement [tâtonnement means “groping”] process that will eventually converge on or approximate general competitive equilibrium. This equilibrium will have the same efficiency properties that general competitive equilibrium has in the Walrasian world in which producers’ goods are privately owned. . .  

—Peter T. Leeson, “We’re All Austrians Now: János Kornai and the Austrian School of Economics,” in vol. 26, pt. A of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, ed. Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle, and Ross B. Emmett (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2008), 212-213.