A school of economic thought that developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, headed by Karl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser, and continued by Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich von Hayek. It is committed to the inviolability of free trade between individual economic actors, and opposed to almost all kinds of state expenditure, beyond those necessary to sustain very basic functions of government. From a starting point of liberal individualism, the school reasons in a relatively a priori fashion, often seeming indifferent to the evident success of mixed economies, and their apparent ability to avoid evils such as communism, totalitarianism, or serfdom, in the contemporary world (Hayek was even led to deny the evident success of Scandinavian economies, and the happiness of their people). The running battles between Hayek and Keynes and their followers over the propriety or utility, of state intervention in (or control of some aspects of) markets still polarize many economists. The Austrian School is usually supposed to have been insensitive to the need for legal regulation of markets, or the dangers of cartels and monopolies. Its neo-classical successors share suspicion of state expenditures but are more cavalier about state intervention by monetary policy. See also Bastiat, Frédéric.