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In almost all aspects of social life government intervention seems much more pervasive and intrusive today than ever before – at least in many of the Western countries. Governments seem year by year to consume still more resources and to regulate the details of the actions and interactions of their citizens still further.

Of all the various interventions into the market economy, which have been invented and implemented by man and state, those that historically have caused the gravest consequences in the advanced industrialized economies surely are the inflationist policies, which lead inexorably to the business cycle in all of its various aspects and manifestations. In this paper, we shall attempt to trace through a number of socio-economic consequences and implications of the business cycle. We are convinced that ultimately the business cycle has political implications, which are just as far reaching and grave as its numerous economic consequences.

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).

In this chapter, we present fragments of previously unpublished correspondence between Ludwig Lachmann and G. L. S. Shackle on the nature of institutions. This correspondence allows us to rationally reconstruct a theory of institutions, which extends Lachmann’s theoretical work. Shackle pointed out to Lachmann that institutions might be inputs into economic activities and that they themselves may be reproduced and transformed by these activities. Lachmann in turn contended that institutions consist of “instruments of interpretation.” We develop the concept of “instruments of interpretation” as a subset of institutions. These instruments are mental models and cognitive tools which are (1) inputs complementary to capital goods (2) jointly produced, reproduced, and transformed through economic activity. We suggest that in contrast to privately produced capital goods, parts of the institutional infrastructure are produced jointly as shared goods because the use of certain institutional elements is non-exclusive and non-subtractable; these elements – instruments of interpretation – are produced and reproduced by sharing and contributions through a process of joint production. This chapter explicitly connects two different but essential themes in Lachmann’s work: capital, and institutions. By combining these two strands of Lachmann’s work, we are able to demonstrate that there is a cross-complementarity between institutional orders and capital structures. This connection in turn provides a thicker understanding of the workings of markets.

This paper will develop some of the social and political implications of the Austrian theory of interventionism originally presented by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek.¹ Specifically, it stresses the inherently destabilizing and retrogressive characteristics of the interventionist dynamic within a market system and argues that the dislocations produced by political intervention in the market system ultimately require the replacement of the price mechanism by a completely different system for the allocation of resources based on arbitrary political decision-making (the Zwangswirtschaft type of social organization discussed by von Mises). These points will be developed within the framework of an analytical model of the structure and dynamics of political capitalism as it has evolved historically in the U.S.

School rampage shootings are acts of terrorism. As Walter Laqueur (1977) noted, “…Terrorists’ attitudes toward the media as a whole have been friendly, and with good reason. The success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives” (p. 109, emphasis added). School rampage shootings qualitatively changed after Columbine from merely realized revenge fantasies to orchestrated media events (Larkin, 2009). Laqueur noted in reference to terrorist acts that they are “propaganda by deed” (1977, p. 49). The more outrageous the act, the more “senseless” in terms of conventional interpretations of reality, the greater the body count, the larger and more intense the media feeding frenzy. Innocent victims are thus sacrificed to the perpetrators’ need to be recognized and to be taken seriously. In the wake of (Columbine shooters) Harris and Klebold's “Basement Tapes,” videotapes of their activities and fantasies, web pages, diaries, doodles, lists, and even school paper assignments, it is now incumbent on any rampage shooter to produce a manifesto, videotapes, pictures, websites, and messages in any newly invented medium to vent his anger, frustration, theory of revolution, and rationale for his act. I use the term “his” because rampage shootings are, in part, a response to a crisis in hegemonic masculinity (Kellner, 2008; Kimmel & Mahler, 2003; Larkin, 2011), which has been mentioned by several researchers in this volume.

Few of the spaces of Milan are so strongly loaded with cultural and political baggage as “Chinatown” – the ethnic neighborhood on Paolo Sarpi Street – where a handful of roads, the global flow of Chinese goods, and the daily routines of elderly people and families are merged. The complexity of the “Sarpi Question” is precisely determined by the discussion of social dimensions, space and ethnoracial, economic and political, all at once.

In order to come to a deeper understanding of the economic mechanism of development of a city, this chapter begins by examining the causes that led to the break of an apparent balance in the practices of local cohabitation of the Chinese District in Milan. This chapter will also examine the relationship of power and conflict between the local government and the social groups, from the point of view of an urban change process. This framework deals with reclaiming urban space and the requalification processes aimed at improving the physical context of the Sarpi area, and especially at starting up processes of financial revitalization.

“No buses, no taxis, no cars and no trading. Why don't you just build a wall around us?” reads a banner displayed by traders on Sarpi Street in the 2008 Christmas season, the first month of controlled traffic flow. Ethnographic research attempts to explain how this result was reached.

The voice of Italian residents is only one of those emerging from the results of this research, along with those of business owners, city users, and local politicians. It is an interplay between antagonism and juxtaposition in which I have tried to highlight the existing conflict with the aim of understanding and explaining the tension in this urban space. Most importantly, this case demonstrates that the problem of cohabitation in a socially mixed neighborhood is a problem of representation and perception, which is essentially political.

The opening conclusions deal with the paradox of the urban safety policies promoted by the Milan local government as a place of decompression in the face of strong social pressure on immigration, precariousness, and insecurity. Strategies aimed at places to act on people.