For these theorists—Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek being the most prominent, along with Joseph Schumpeter as the Austrian émigré voice in the United States—the free market has a long-run evolutionary structure that government intervention can only harm. Siding firmly with the "can't live without it" school, the Austrian school rejected the state as having any positive or necessary role in the economy. They also rejected the increasing mathematization of economics that was underway at that time. Seeing the economy as evolutionary, disequilibrial, and driven by entrepreneurs acting in uncertainty, they preferred historical analysis to differential calculus.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 383