Acknowledgments ixappeared, and chapterȄ(also renamed) has been modified at its beginning
to read less like an invited introduction to others’ articles. Several pages of
chapterȁȄhave been cut out because they rebut a strained interpretation of
Mises’s work that is hardly worth attention. Chapterȃ, “Ļe Debate about
the Efficiency of a Socialist Economy,” although and perhaps especially
because it dates fromȀȈȃȈ, is printed unchanged.
Ļe selection process has just happened to give the book an Austrian
flavor not originally intended. Ļe bulk of my work is not particularly
Austrian. On whether I count as an Austrian economist, see the opening
lines of chapterȅ.
ōŏŗŚśţŘőŐœřőŚŠş
For enjoyable and instructive discussions over many years, I am indebted
to dozens, even hundreds, of students in my graduate Seminar in Polit-
ical Economy at the University of Virginia and at Auburn University.
(Ļat seminar covered its topics in more scope, detail, and technicalities
than the articles included here.) Many persons, including ones both men-
tioned and unmentioned in the individual papers, have given me valu-
able instruction, encouragement, provocation, and warnings. I hesitate to
list names because any such list would be incomplete and would suffer
from my lapses of memory; but it would include Roger Garrison, Luis
Dopico, Daniel Edwards, Robert Greenfield, Roger Koppl, Juergen Back-
haus, Steven Caudill, Warren Nutter, Edgar Browning, William Breit,
Northrup Buechner, Murray Rothbard, James Buchanan, Gordon Tul-
lock, and, to go back many years, Aurelius Morgner, James Waller, and
Clarence Philbrook.
Ļe Ludwig von Mises Institute made no suggestion that I mod-
erate any views contrary to its own. For this and other reasons I am
indebted to Llewellyn Rockwell, the Institute’s chairman, and Douglas
French, its president. Jeffrey Tucker, editorial vice president, encouraged
and patiently supported this book project from the beginning. Perhaps
the Institute’s greatest support has been the services of Miss Lauren Bar-
low. She helped select the papers to reprint; standardized the system of
citations (including placement of notes where they belong, at the bottom
of each page); questioned errors, undue repetition, and infelicitous for-
mulations; coped with many drafts; and gave invaluable support on the
many arduous chores scarcely imaginable by someone who has not tried
to assemble diverse articles into a coherent (I hope) book.