 Writing in the Washington Post this week, E.J. Dionne claims that it's the Austrian School of Economics that's responsible for all the gridlock in Washington, D.C. I only wish that Austrian economics had so much influence, and I only wish we could get some more gridlock in Washington, D.C. Dionne claims that it's the popularity of the ideas of Ron Paul, Ludwig von Mises, and F.A. Hayek that's causing all of this gridlock in Washington, D.C. Well, I think it's certainly true that the ideas of those men are popular. I don't think it's quite true to say that they're influential as spending deficits and money printing grows ever larger. Dionne claims that the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression, that World War II got us out of the Great Depression. But in fact, real consumption per capita during World War II was the same as it was during the 1930s. It was the return of peace, prosperity, sound money, and free markets after World War II in a relative sense that led to prosperity. He also claims that Keynesian economics has saved us in the current crisis, that Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson came to the rescue and got us out of this crisis. Well, we would argue that we're certainly not out of the crisis completely and that Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson have only increased the supply of money and national debt in the process. He also makes the curious claim that Hayek said in the road to serfdom that one step on the road to welfare redistribution and we're going to end up in Nazi Germany. Hayek, of course, never said that. If we look at what happened from 100 years ago, let's say, to today, what we find is in America 100 years ago where the average American had no contact with the federal government outside of the U.S. post office. Today, look what's happened. We have a national debt of $17 plus trillion. We have a federal government with unfunded liabilities of over $200 trillion. We have our military and bases in over 150 countries around the world and we have a national security agency, the NSA, that is spying on Americans and people around the world. And we're using drones to spy on Americans and to kill people in other countries. And we also have 2 million Americans in prison. So Hayek's theory about the road to serfdom certainly brings some truth today. We may not be in Nazi Germany, but we've traveled down the road to serfdom a very long way. And that's the Mises View.