Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Tom Woods, a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, received the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award, given in Vienna by the Hayek Institute and the Austrian Economics Center, in 2019. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania.

Tom’s other books include the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Meltdown (on the financial crisis, featuring a foreword by Ron Paul). His book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy won the $50,000 first prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards.

Tom’s articles have appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals, and his books have been translated into a dozen languages.

Tom hosts the Tom Woods Show, a libertarian podcast with thousands of episodes, and he created hundreds of videos in history for the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum.

Articles

The Public Health Bureaucracy: Enemy of the Public, Enemy of Health

06/11/2025 The Misesian Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

We can run society according to the rules of private property and freedom, or we can run it by bureaucratic decree, and the covid episode reminded us of just how important that choice is.

The Seen and the Unseen of Covid-19

10/28/2020 Mises Wire Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

It’s not enough to evaluate the short-term consequences of a policy for one small group. If you want to know the long-term consequences or the real consequence of it, you look at the long-term effects on everybody.

The Misplaced Fear of “Monopoly”

08/11/2020 Mises Wire Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

The political entrepreneur succeeds by using the implicit violence of government to cripple his competitors and harm consumers. The market entrepreneur, on the other hand, makes his fortune by providing consumers with products they need at prices they can afford.

Publications

When Mainstream Economics Was Wrong, Mark Thornton Was Right

08/11/2018 Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

[ Foreword to Mark Thornton’s new book The Skyscraper Curse: And How Austrian Economists Predicted Every Major Economic Crisis of the Last Century (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018).] In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the economics

Rollback

01/11/2016 Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Rollback takes on both liberal and conservative conventions and their habits of mind. The objective of the work is dramatically ambitious. Woods writes with relentless precision, like an intellectual surgeon, to convince the reader that the

Back on the Road to Serfdom

01/11/2016 Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

The threat of statism has reemerged in force. The federal government has seized on the economic crisis to radically expand its power—through bailouts, “stimulus” packages, a trillion-dollar health care plan, “jobs bills,” massive expansions of the

Media

The Covid Fiasco: Reflections Five Years Later

07/24/2025 Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Tom Woods offers a critical analysis of the COVID-19 policy response, while underscoring the Mises Institute’s principled opposition to prevailing narratives.

Austrian Economics in the Age of MAGA

07/20/2025 Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

The right dismisses economics at its peril.

The Public Health Bureaucracy: Enemy of the Public, Enemy of Health

04/28/2025 Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

"Bureaucracies never had to prove they helped—they only had to follow the rules and demand obedience."