70 Year Magazine Archive

From the Continent

by Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Tins month October 1985 something remarkable happened in Austria: The Socialist government issued a new hundred-Schilling bank note (the equivalent of about five dollars) with the portrait of Eugen Böhm von Bawerk (1851 1914), the economist who put the Austrian School on the map, This is a startling occurrence because the Austrian School is almost unknown in Austria. If I mention it there, people think that I am retelling to either a musical, an ethnological, a psychiatric, or a medical tradition, or to a group of artists. (All these “Austrian schools” do or did exist,) In order to remedy this situation, a Carl Menger Society—named after the school’s founder—has just been established in Vienna. The president is Friedrich A. Hayek,

The reader might wonder what is the relationship between a Socialist Austrian government—or indeed any Socialist party in Europe—and a freemarket economy. The answer is that theory differs greatly from practice, and, in order to understand this, one must have a certain grasp of European history and sociology.

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