I am sorry that a combination of causes — geography, my busy schedule and no less my age — make it impossible for me to attend this gathering. If I were able to be present, I would have said a few words on Professor Hayek and his achievements. As conditions are, I have to put these remarks in writing and am grateful to our friends who will present them for me.
(Reprinted by courtesy of Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, October 1, 1973 issue, and with permission of Dr. Henry Hazlitt.)
Last Saturday marked the 92nd birthday of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest analytical economist of his generation. He has also been one of this century’s ablest champions of private enterprise and the free market.
[Extract consisting of first four paragraphs in article entitled, “How Mises Changed My Mind,” reprinted from The Mont Pelerin Quarterly, Volume III, October 1961, No. 3, page 16.]
A generation of students at New York University’s graduate business school who took the economics courses of Ludwig von Mises remember a gentle, diminutive soft spoken, white-haired European scholar– with a mind like a steel trap.
September 29, 1981, is the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Von Mises was my teacher and mentor and the source or inspiration for most of what I know and consider to be important and worthwhile in these fields of what enables me to understand the events shaping the world in which we live. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to him, because I believe that he deserves to occupy a major place in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.
I first met Professor, Mises some 51 years ago.
It’s been thirty years since my graduate school teacher of economic theory died, and as I again look over his writings that spanned more than a quarter century, I am reminded how relevant they are to the issues of our day. Some truths are enduring.
Dating is perhaps the freest “market” in the United States today, and its lack of regulation can teach us powerful lessons about the flaws inherent in government regulation.
Most people recognize the absurdity of trying to regulate romantic relationships. What many don’t realize is that this absurdity stems not from the nature of these relationships, but from the nature of state intervention. For the same reasons that regulating dating would be counter-productive, regulating many consumer choices is unwise.
