Biographies

Chris Sciabarra, author of an important new work on freedom's philosophical foundations, explains the impact of the Austrian tradition and his mentor Murray N. Rothbard. 

A brilliant physicist and his musings on the failures of the state.

Despite the many illustrious forerunners in its six-hundred year prehistory, Carl Menger (1840-1921) was the true and sole founder of the Austrian school of economics proper. He merits this title if for no other reason than that he created the system of value and price theory that constitutes the core of Austrian economic theory. But Menger did more than this: he also originated and consistently applied the correct, praxeological method for pursuing theoretical research in economics. Thus in its method and core theory, Austrian economics always was and will forever remain Mengerian economics.

Fetter saw "economics as essentially the study of value, and has viewed all economic phenomena as the concrete expression, under varied circumstances, of one uniform theory of value.

John Kenneth Galbraith has been a socialist--which is to say, an opponent of freedom--for nearly all of his career. 

Raimondo's new biography of this intellectual giant is energetic, fair, comprehensive, and well-researched. You will be drawn to Rothbard's style of thinking and approach to ideas.

As usual Murray Rothbard was right. In his Classical Economics, he contrasts John Stuart Mill with his father James Mill: "Instead of possessing a hard-nosed cadre intellect, John Stuart was the quintessence of soft rather than hard core,

At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the "man of the century" for having "saved capitalism," echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him "the greatest figure of the twentieth century." The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be more appropriate.

Richard Cantillon is virtually unknown today, but he pioneered a new way to examine social and economic affairs.  

"The trouble with socialism," Oscar Wilde once wrote, "is that it takes too many evenings." Indeed, the private lives of socialists are highly politicized. They must not be interested in anything-not even their families-other than socialism. The theory must inform every aspect of their lives, which must be a microcosm of a socialist society: there must be no escape from the All-Embracing Theory. Or the All-Embracing State.