Biographies

Two freedom advocates square off on school vouchers.

Röpke's censored treatise foreshadowed Human Action.

To neoconservatives and even to some libertarians, Sidney Hook is a hero. 

Paul Krugman makes the case for loving Keynes. An Austrian responds.

In fact, the Roosevelt legacy is not individualism; it is certainly not liberty. His continuing legacy is one of unprecedented government intervention. Roosevelt crushed property rights. He constructed huge public works projects. He also helped lead the U.S. into its disastrous slide into imperialism and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in numerous foreign conflicts (and millions of foreigners). In reality, the leviathan state in all its evil owes much to TR.

The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises's colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business.

As with other economists of the "old liberal" school, the rise of Nazism forced Röpke out of Germany and into intellectual exile. After the war, however, he made a triumphant return as adviser to finance minister Ludwig Erhard, another unsung hero of the period. Erhard repealed Germanys wartime economic controls and set the stage for the postwar boom. For this reason, Röpke is often called the brains behind the German economic miracle. He also became the most articulate opponent of European political integration.

The intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin has achieved great renown for essays that range from the analysis of liberty to memoirs of Russian poets.

One school of thought—Public Choice—says that statesmen can't exist in a democracy. Politics consists of vote trading, logrolling, rent seeking, and legislated looting. Politicians buy and sell favors, lobbyists act as middlemen, and the public gets fleeced. It can be no other way, say these theorists.