Biographies

In this interview with Jeffrey Tucker, Dr.

Flynn gradually came around to a full-blown embrace of the free market as the only means to check the power of the government-business combine.

The vast majority of people who have learned anything about economics have relied on Bastiat or publications that were influenced by his work. This collection — possibly more than anything ever written about economics — is the antidote for economic illiteracy regarding such things as the inadvisability of tariffs and price controls, and everyone from the novice to the PhD economist will benefit from reading it.

I just had the pleasure of preparing a chapter from Flynn’s

Faced with this shattering blow, Baldy Harper never faltered; with unswerving and inspiring integrity, he determined to build the Institute for Humane Studies even without its promised endowment.

Indeed, the origins of economic theory itself can be traced to CantilIon. William Stanley Jevons, one of the cofounders of the marginalist revolution, and the economist who is generally credited with rediscovering Cantillon, called the Essai "a systematic and connected treatise, going over in a concise manner nearly the whole field of economics…. It is thus the first treatise on economics." He dubbed the work the "Cradle of Political Economy." Joseph Schumpeter, the great historian of economic thought and student of Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, described the Essai as "the first systematic penetration of the field of economics." In his treatise on the history of economic thought, Murray N. Rothbard named Cantillon "the founding father of modern economics."

Ludwig von Mises (29 Sept. 1881-10 Oct.

“I champion an economic order ruled by free prices and markets...the only economic order compatible with human freedom.”

The prehistory the Austrian School of economics can be found in the works of the Spanish scholastics written in the "Spanish Golden Century."

Claude Frederic Bastiat was a French economist, legislator, and writer who championed private property, free markets, and limited government. Perhaps the main underlying theme of Bastiat's writings was that the free market was inherently a source of "economic harmony" among individuals, as long as government was restricted to the function of protecting the lives, liberties, and property of citizens from theft or aggression. To Bastiat, governmental coercion was only legitimate if it served "to guarantee security of person, liberty, and property rights, to cause justice to reign over all."