Thank you for this great summary, especially for those readers who have little knowledge of what The Austrian School consists of, and who might be interested in getting a quick historical context and an overview of the School’s philosophy.

I like how the 2nd paragraph outlines the Unholy Alliance between our Dysfunctional Financial Sector and our Modern Welfare State (and the coming demise of both of them):

The attempts of industrial nations to quell the pent-up need for correction through government intervention will in time lead to a gain that is deceptive at best — but hardly a real solution.
These astonishingly purposeful government interventions are certainly no accident.
In recent decades, the so-called welfare states have entered into a very close symbiosis with the financial sector.
In no other sector of the economy — save perhaps the armaments industry in certain countries — are institutions, people, and the economy so closely interwoven with the state as is the case with the finance industry.
It has often been possible in recent years to get the impression that welfare states might be competing, in the most imaginative and opportunistic ways, with the banking industry in their efforts to circumvent the basic [NATURAL] laws that rule economics, money, and the market.

The fact that The Austrian School found a logical home in America gives one hope that America’s leaders will one day (through the efforts of ambassadors like Dr. Ron Paul) discover the power of the prescriptions that the Austrian Economic School promotes.

America’s historical roots in Europe and European culture coexisted in a tense relationship with the need to escape the economic and political oppression of Europe —— this played out in time and created in America a culture and a political philosophy which provided the underpinnings for the way the early immigrants saw their future nation.
America was founded less on Rugged Individualism than we like to think — her pioneers would never have survived without cooperation. But what America did realize early on as displayed in her Constitution was that recognition of the importance of the Individual and the centrality of the Individual were keys to building a Great Society for all.
In this, America, foremost of all nations even today, is most attuned to the natural teachings of the Nature of Economic Things as presented in The Austrian School.

That is why this next paragraph comes so very close to describing the American ideal in my opinion. Both America and the Austrian School seem to have the same ‘Natural Derivation’ in that they both conform to the “assumption that the individual was the decisive economic agent”.

Based on the assumption that the individual was the decisive economic agent, and thus centering its research on individual preferences and on the intersubjective balancing of these preferences in the context of markets, the Austrian School has consistently pointed to the fact that institutions such as money, states, and markets had emerged without any planning, without any central purpose, and without force.
They had emerged on the basis of human interaction alone, and in a manner that was therefore natural, befitting both humans and human logic.
This basic insight counters all political and economic ideologies that view such institutions as working arenas for the establishment or development of authoritarian activity aimed at influencing or even controlling the direction of individual preferences or their intersubjective balance.

Thank you to Eugen-Maria Schulak and Herbert Unterköfler for their new book and this wonderful excerpt, introducing us to their work. I am sure that we ALL wish you well.