Power and Market [antikvár]

PréfacéThis book emerges out of a comprehensive treatise on économies that I wrote several years ago, Man, Economy, and State (2 vols., Van Nostrand, 1962). That book was designed to offer an economic analysis of Crusoe économies, the free market, and of violent interventionempirically, by government almost ex-clusively. For various reasons, the economic analysis of government intervention could only be presented in Condensed and truncated form in the final, published volume. The presentbook serves to fill a long-standing gap by presenting an extensive, revised and updated analysis of violent intervention in the economy.Furthermore, this book discusses a problem that the published version of Man, Economy, and State necessarily had to leave in the dark: the rőle of protection agencies in a purely free-market economy. The problem of how the purely free-market economy would enforce the rights of person and property against violent aggression was not faced there, and the book simply assumed, as a theoretical model, that no one in the free market would act to aggress against the person or property of his fellowmen. Clearly it is unsatisfactory to leave the problem in such a state, for how would a purely free society deal with the problem of defending person and property from violent at-tacks?Virtually ail writers on political economy have rather hastily and a priori assumed that a free market simply cannot provide defense or enforcement services and that therefore some form of coercive-monopoly governmental intervention and aggression must be superimposed upon the market in order to provide