Category: Today

On Feb. 27, 1933, Germany’s parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, was set on fire. The event was pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany, as the Nazis used the fire as evidence that the Communists were plotting against the German government, and promptly suspended civil liberties and arrested Communists in mass, including members of the parliament, leading to a gain in seats for the National Socialists. 

On Feb. 27, 1951, the Twenty-​second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified.

On Feb. 26, 1993, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City was detonated, killing six and injuring over a thousand people.

On Feb. 26, 1866, Herbert Henry Dow was born in Canada. He was a prolific inventor and a successful businessman, who founded the Dow Chemical Company in 1897. 

The Twenty-​second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified on February 27, 1951.

February 27 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.

On February 24 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review.

February 14 marks Estonia’s Declaration of Independence, in 1918.

On February 23, 1898, Émile Zola was imprisoned in France after writing “J’accuse,” a letter accusing the French government of anti-​Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

Fifty-​eight years earlier, Austrian economist Carl Menger was born.

Menger would go on to contribute to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which supplanted cost-​of-​production theories of value in economics, in his first book, translated into English as “Principles of Economics.” Though expert in mathematics (he served as tutor in economics and statistics to Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria not long after the publication of the Principles), his approach to marginal theory was the least mathematical of his famous “co-​discovers” of the principle, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras. Rooted in a subjective theory of value, it was the most realistic and least model-​based of the marginalist revolutionaries, and he was most interested in price formation, not “price determination,” which focused almost exclusively on equilibrium conditions. He developed an evolutionary theory of money, as well.

Menger’s second book was a defense of a particular kind of general theory in social science, and an explanation of the importance of “invisible hand” processes in the social world. The first theme caused a firestorm of debate in the German-​speaking world, where “socialists of the chair” and other opponents of laissez faire went ballistic regarding the possibility of permanence of finding laws in the social world that were not of their own constructing. The second theme developed ideas found in Adam Smith, and extended them.

Menger inspired two major followers, Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-​Bawerk. The former named “marginal utility” and developed the first rigorous view of cost as opportunities foregone; the second advanced a time-​preference theory of interest and theory of the structure of production. Later followers of this “Austrian School” included Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.