Biographies

When he was in his 20s, having newly discovered libertarian ideas, having read Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, and others, having met Rothbard and conversed with him at length, Nozick was fired up with excitement.

R.C. wouldn't tolerate news stories that referred to the "public schools," for example. His reporters were required to refer to them as "government schools." R.C. himself preferred the phrase "gun-run schools" and used it liberally on the editorial page.

Like today's central bankers, John Law proposed to "supply the nation" with a sufficiency of money. The increased money was supposed to vivify trade and increase employment and production — the "employment" motif providing a nice proto-Keynesian touch.

Part of the experience of reading Newsweek in the early 1960’s was a weekly column called "Business Tides."  It offered wide-ranging and insightful commentary on just about anything that had anything to do with the economy or with economics.

Weighing in on the side of John Locke, not only on interest rates but also in a general and comprehensive vision of economic laissez-faire that eve

Weighing in on the side of John Locke, not only on interest rates but also in a general and comprehensive vision of economic laissez-faire that even surpassed Locke, were two brothers, Dudley and Roger North.

Though he devoted much of his life to writing, editing, publishing, and political activism, it isn't really for any of these activities that Jo Labadie should be remembered fondly by libertarians in the 21st century.

Herbert Spencer is often misrepresented in textbooks and websites as a "social Darwinist," but these claims describe a mythical Spencer that never existed. The real Spencer was quite different. The real Spencer often expressed views quite similar to modern-day libertarians.

John Locke, the Protestant Scholastic, was essentially in the hard-money, metallist, anti-inflationist tradition of the Scholastics; his opponents, on the other hand, helped set the tone for the inflationist schemers and projectors of the next century.

Mises (1881–1973) is one of the sleeping giants of the 20th century. For many decades he was the leader of the Austrian School of economic and social thought but he is scarcely a household name, even among economists and classical liberals.