On June 19, William Harold Hutt, one of the most productive and creative economists of this century, died in Irving, Texas, at the age of 89. Born in London, Hutt served in the Royal Flying Corps in World War I, and then went to the London School of Economics, where he studied under the great free-market and hard-money economist Edwin Cannan. Hutt was graduated in 1924, and spent several years in publishing.

The death of F.A. Hayek at the age of 92 marks the end of an era, the Mises-Hayek era. Converted from Fabian socialism by Ludwig von Mises’s devastating critique, Socialism, in the early 1920s, Hayek took his place as the greatest of the glittering generation of economists and social scientists who became followers of Mises in the Vienna of the 1920s, and who took part in Mises’s famed weekly privatseminar held in his office at the Chamber of Commerce.

V. Orval Watts, one of the leading free-market economists of the World War II and post-war eras, died on March 30 this year. When I first met him, in the winter of 1947, he was a leading economist at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the only free-market organization and think-tank of that era. He was a pleasantly sardonic man in his late forties.

For those of us who have loved as well as revered Ludwig von Mises, words cannot express our great sense of loss: of this gracious, brilliant and wonderful man; this man of unblemished integrity; this courageous and lifelong fighter for human freedom; this all-encompassing scholar; this noble inspiration to us all. And above all this gentle and charming friend, this man who brought to the rest of us the living embodiment of the culture and the charm of pre-World War I Vienna.

Margit von Mises died on June 25, just a week short of her 103rd birthday. While physically frail the last few years, Margit remained mentally alert until a few months before her death. Indeed, such a conventional phrase as “mentally alert” scarcely begins to describe Margit: down nearly to the end, she was sharp as a tack, vitally interested in the world and in everyone around her. It was impossible to put anything over on her, as people often try to do with the elderly.

The Mises Institute comes at both economic scholarship and applied political philosophy from a very different perspective. It believes that “policy analysis” without principle is mere flim-flam and ad-hocery—murky political conclusions resting on foundations of sand. It also believes that policy analysis that does not rest on scholarly principles is scarcely worth the paper it is written on or the time and money devoted to it.

In a famous lyric of a generation ago, Bob Dylan twitted the then-dominant “bourgeois” culture, “it doesn’t take a weatherman to know the way the wind blows.” Indeed, and the significance of this phrase today has nothing to do with the group of crazed Stalinist youth who once called themselves “the Weathermen.” The phrase, in fact, is all too relevant to the present day.

Index

Abortion, 149–50, 488–89

Abscam, 182–83

Absolutism, 413

Accountants, 226

ACT-UP, 436

Adams, Ted, 384

Affirmative action, 118, 434, 492–93

Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 210

AFL-CIO, 135–136

Africa, 86, 152

Afrikaners, 495

Agricultural Labor Relations Act (California), 142