Editor's introduction

This volume of Advances in Austrian Economics brings together a number of studies, but split along two fields of concentrations. The primary, which makes up the vast majority of the pages of the volume, is dedicated to an examination and re-appreciation of the insight of the Austrian School of Economics usually referred to as the theory of interventionism and closely associated with the research of the Austrian School giants Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek (e.g. Mises [1929] 1996 [1940] 1998; Hayek, [1944] 1976). Together they formulated and applied an innovative theory of how government intervention may come to have a dynamic character, where intervention in one area will tend to generate still more and still farther-reaching interventions. The second is a small section with a debate between on one hand, Walter Block and William Barnett and on the other, Gordon Tullock, which is part of a long on-going debate on Austrian business cycle theory, which initially began elsewhere (Tullock, 1987, 1989; Salerno, 1989; Wagner, 2001; Block, 2001).