In the great debates of the period, it was said that Hayek had lost to the New Economics of Keynes and his followers. It was more precisely true that the Keynesians had won not by having better argument but force of government policy. The Misesians and Hayekians of the time decided that they would fight the battle of ideas and thus sprang up a host of institutions that would continue the work of liberty, despite all political impediments.
Joseph Salerno highlights Sennholz's contributions to the rebirth of interest in Austrian monetary and business cycle theory and the continuing importance of his works today. He was one of a handful of academic economists to stand fast against the postwar tidal waves of Keynesian macroeconomics and Friedmanite monetarism that swept over American academia in the 1950's and 1960's and threatened to completely submerge sound monetary economics.
I should have known Murray Rothbard was something special the first night of class when I noticed a fellow student, James Philbin, following behind Murray as he entered the classroom carrying a stool for Murray to sit on as he lectured.
Mencken is fashionable again, and the usual misunderstanding about his life and legacy are all back. Murray N. Rothbard points to the essential political orientation that helps makes sense of his relentless opposition to the welfare-warefare state: Mencken was a libertarian. This is Rothbard's classic study.
Tom DiLorenzo is well able to look out for himself, but one comment in Ken Masugi's review of his book on Lincoln merits our attention.
Most people regard John Stuart Mill as one of the great classical liberals of the nineteenth century. Though Mill made unnecessary concessions to socialism, did he not in On Liberty defend without compromise personal liberty
Abraham Lincoln is incorrectly remembered as a restorer of liberty, while Prussian autocrat Otto von Bismarck is generally seen as a ruthless dictator, eager to sacrifice men to his policy of deciding the future of his countrymen "by blood and iron." Contrary to this view, Adam Young explains why both men should be viewed as allied together in the common cause of destroying the principles of classical liberalism.
Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: he considers, as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante,
The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old age, and it won't guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is fully capable of awful screw-ups. But both theory and practice indicate that its screw-ups are less pervasive and more easily corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.
What set in motion the explosive technological advance of the last 250 years was the world of ideas. Great thinkers began to understand the internal logic of the market economy and its potential for liberating mankind from poverty, dependency, and despotic rule.
