But my indebtedness to at least three writers is of so specific a nature that I cannot allow it to pass unmentioned. This is inevitable when one writes in a field in which many of the world’s finest minds have labored. Cohen has remarked: “The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others.” īecause this is a work of exposition I have availed myself freely and without detailed acknowledgment (except for rare footnotes and quotations) of the ideas of others. His mind will, of course, be as receptive to new ideas as to old ones but he will be content to put aside merely restless or exhibitionistic straining for novelty and originality. He will not be forever seeking a revolution, a “fresh start,” in economic thought. But the student whose aim is to attain as much truth as possible will not be frightened by such adjectives. The present essay itself is, I suppose, unblushingly “classical,” “traditional” and “orthodox”: at least these are the epithets with which those whose sophisms are here subjected to analysis will no doubt attempt to dismiss it. Rather its effort is to show that many of the ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it. It makes no claim to originality with regard to any of the chief ideas that it expounds. The volume is therefore primarily one of exposition. That is the assumption of this volume and of its somewhat ambitious and belligerent title. Perhaps the shortest and surest way to an understanding of economics is through a dissection of such errors, and particularly of the central error from which they stem. There is not a major government in the world at this moment, however, whose economic policies are not influenced if they are not almost wholly determined by acceptance of some of these fallacies. But the difference between one new school and another is merely that one group wakes up earlier than another to the absurdities to which its false premises are driving it, and becomes at that moment inconsistent by either unwittingly abandoning its false premises or accepting conclusions from them less disturbing or fantastic than those that logic would demand. The one thing that has prevented this has been their own self-contradictions, which have scattered those who accept the same premises into a hundred different “schools,” for the simple reason that it is impossible in matters touching practical life to be consistently wrong. This book is an analysis of economic fallacies that are at last so prevalent that they have almost become a new orthodoxy. Hayek, there is "no other modern book from which the intelligent layman can learn so much about the basic truths of economics in so short a time." This primer on economic principles brilliantly analyzes the seen and unseen consequences of political and economic actions.
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