Biographies

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Lew Rockwell offers a tribute to Hans Sennholz, the first student in the United States to write a dissertation and receive a PhD under the guidance of Ludwig von Mises.

The President today, writes Adam Young, is the focus of political and increasingly social life. He is presented to the public as an all-purpose master of every issue and situation, a veritable demigod in his reputation for near omniscience and infallibility.

In his An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Murray Rothbard toppled Adam Smith from his place as the founder of modern economics. 

Thomas Szasz has long been the foremost critic of involuntary psychiatric commitment, and his many books on psychiatric tyranny have won for him a well-deserved reputation as a champion of liberty.

Under Alan Greenspan's rule at the Fed, the function of the central bank as a bailout institution has experienced a new golden age, writes Antony Mueller. 

Charles Adams, the tax writer, tells young people to get a liberal education and go with the flow. He took tax law and he taught history. He saw that there was a tax story behind every event. Taxes, not slavery, caused the Civil War.Taxes began in Sumer. “Taxes are the fuel that make civilizations run,” but how we tax and spend determines to a large extent whether we are prosperous or poor, free or enslaved, and most importantly, good or evil. Taxes are forced exaction.

Protection or Free Trade, published in 1886, is undoubtedly one of the most significant works ever written on the subject, writes Laurence Vance.

Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Austrian Workshop series in Auburn, Alabama, on 29 July 2004.