ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY

Wilhelm Ropke, along with von Mises and Hayek, is one of the three de rigueur continental champions of the Economic Right. This volume, first published in Austria during the late thirties, and inexplicably withheld from an English translation until now, is summarily updated, at least with notes, for this edition. It is both a primer of the ins and outs of industrial marketings within a democratic social structure and also an analysis of the so called capitalist crises. It is a cogent and careful accounting, as scrupulously scientific as its author states, and adamantly opposed to totalitarianism, whether it be Fascistic, under whose shadow the book was originally penned, or communist/socialist. Herr Ropke attacks the ""planned chaos"" of arbitrary governmental policies, the purchasing power theory of wages and all full-employment-at-any-cost Keynesianism. His ""third road"" approach offers a system of both regulatory and propulsive forces, one geared to the solving of the moral-vital problem, not through the centralization cult, but the free market with its freely fluctuating price schemas in the humane tradition of individual responsibility, competition and challenge. An awesomely complex subject, shrewdly, sharply viewed, of interest to layman and expert alike.