Stephan Kinsella is a registered patent attorney and General Counsel for Applied Optoelectronics, Inc; also Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Editor of Libertarian Papers, and Director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF). He has published numerous articles and books on IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics, including International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford University Press, 2005); Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary (Quid Pro, forthcoming 2011); and Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008).

A former adjunct law professor, he has taught courses at the online Mises Academy–including “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics,” this past winter and “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society,” a 6 week course that started Monday, Jan. 31.

Stephan Kinsella got his BSEE, MSEE (electrical engineering), and JD (law degree) from LSU and LL.M. (master’s in international law) from King’s College London.

He was a partner with the law firm Duane Morris, doing IP law. He practiced oil & gas law, and IP law, in Houston, 1992-94; then patent and IP thereafter.

He is a practicing lawyer, doing patent and other types of law as a general counsel for a high tech laser company; and he also writes and teaches and lectures on legal and libertarian/economic topics. Legal–he published legal treatises for Oxford University Press on IP and international and commercial law; and on the other, he edits Libertarian Papers, he is the founder and director of C4SIF, fights against IP on every front he can, and is a lecturer on libertarian and legal topics for Mises Academy.

His main interests are libertarian political theory, philosopy, and Austrian economics, though he has written and spoken a great deal on IP in recent years due to increased interest in this topic.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I have a job as a lawyer for a company, and a family. My main hobbies, outside of philosophy, Austrian economics, and libertarian theory, teaching, writing, and involvement with the MIses Institute, include science fiction and novels, science, movies, tennis, snow skiing, and traveling and spending time with my family. I used to greatly enjoy motocross and hope to get back into it someday, if I can find time. My son attends a Montessori school so I have spent a lot of time in recent years learning about Montessori and being involved with his school and other parents there. But over the past 20 or so years I have made great friends in the Austro-libertarian community, including great people such as Guido Huelsmann, Hans Hoppe, Lew Rockwell, Peter Klein, Tom DiLorenzo, Jim Yohe, Scott Kjar, Jacob Huebert, Tibor Machan, PJ Doland, Gil Guillory, Jeff Tucker, Roderick Long, Mark Brandly, John Cobin, Roberta Modugno, Lee Iglody, Jeff Barr, Doug French, Deanna Forbush, Brad Edmonds, Karen De Coster, David Gordon, Hunt Tooley, Sean Gabb, Jeff Herbener, Tony Deden, Toby Baxendale, Walter Block, Joseph Salerno and many others that I truly feel privileged to know. A “normal” life without these connections would be far less rich and meaningful. And there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of younger Austro-libertarians I have had the pleasure of interacting with in recent years.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I explain a bit of this in How I Became A Libertarian (published as “Being a Libertarian” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians, compiled by Walter Block; Mises Institute 2010). I’m 45 and have been libertarian since about 11th grade, or 29 years ago, when a librarian at Catholic High School recommended Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead to me. This led me to a love of philosophy and libertarianism, and eventually to Mises, Rothbard, and other Austrians, as well as free market economists like Milton Friedman. Over time, primarily because of the work of Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe, I came to see how crucially important the Austrian economic paradigm is for clear libertarian and legal thinking. It’s one reason Austrianism plays a strong role in most of my writing, and is a primary theme of my current Mises Academy course Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society.

In one sense, I agree with the wertfrei approach of Austrians–that we should distinguish positive economic analysis from normative views. On the other, I don’t see how any decent human who has Austrian insights will not lean towards a libertarian view of things: if you value peace, prosperity, and cooperation, and you have basic economic literacy, then you cannot help but favor a free market and private property. It’s hard to imagine someone who understand Austrian economics but would favor statist market intervention anyway; he would have to be some kind of weird Austrian genius misanthrope. And conversely, I think a working knowledge of the basics of free market and Austrian economics, and the Austrian dualist approach to methodology (its opposition to monism-scientism-empiricism) is crucial to a sound understanding of normative and political/legal theory. To my mind, they mesh beautifully.

As for the Mises Institute, it is the primary center for the study and promulgation of Misesian Austrian and Rothbardian thought. One of my favorite introductory works, in addition to the standards such as Bastiat’s The Law, Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and Rothbard’s For A New Liberty, was the great and underappreciated collection by Rothbard and Rockwell, The Free Market Reader. In law school in 1988 or so, I visited my good friend Jack Criss, an Objectivist in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was a libertarian AM radio talk show host. Lew Rockwell was a guest on Jack’s show that afternoon; I was able to say hello to Lew during a commercial, which gave me a thrill.

As a young lawyer and budding legal-libertarian scholar in Philadelphia in 1994 I wrote a law review article on Hoppe’s recent book (The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism), which led to attending the John Randolph Club meeting in October 1994, near Washington, D.C. My primary goal was to meet Hoppe, Rothbard, and Rockwell. I was thrilled to meet them, and was able to get Murray to autograph my copy of Man, Economy & State, which he inscribed “To Stephan: For Man & Economy, and against the state —Best regards, Murray Rothbard.” Well, I know the nicer one-volume edition is out now, but just try to get me to part with my musty two-volume copy. Rothbard unfortunately passed away on January 1995, but I shall be forever grateful that I was able to meet him.

I was attracted to the Mises Institute of the 1980s and 1990s. But in the last five or so years, it has become the dominant intellectual force for liberty and economic literacy on the planet, in part because it has been very clear as to its mission of spreading the word of economic literacy. Because of its fidelity to its vision, it embraced the new opportunities offered by the Internet (see Doug French, “The Intellectual Revolution Is in Process“; Jeff Tucker, “A Theory of Open” and “up with iTunes U“; and Gary North, “A Free Week-Long Economics Seminar“). Its influence has only grown because of the embrace of the idea of open information.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
I don’t really think like this. I have never been one of these people who wants to shake hands with Obama or Reagan (or many other people) or celebrities or to visit every continent or state and check off some list. I admire many people: Hoppe, Rockwell, etc., and all the libertarians working for liberty in their various ways. In a way, my love of my fellow man is my greatest inspiration: to fight for a way civilized people can have peace and prosperity and cooperation. For people I greatly admire I am too humble to think I can achieve what they have, so would not say they inspire me: I have in mind people like Mises, Rothbard, Rockwell, and Hoppe. I am happy to admire and learn from and support them and their missions and goals.

You are one of the leaders in arguing against intellectual property. What caused you to research this topic and how do you feel about its success? Is there room for progress?
As I note in “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism,” I initially accepted Rand’s arguments for IP, but I was uneasy with them. There were obvious problems with Rand’s argument. So throughout law school I kept thinking about it, trying to find a better way to justify patent and copyright. Finally I realized the solution was to stop assuming they were valid and then to realize how incompatible these rights are with libertarian property rights. At the same time I was deepening my experience practicing patent law, and nothing I saw contradicted my growing skepticism.

I have always been, and am still, most interested in things like the basics of libertarian political philosophy (the foundations of rights, etc.), basic and Austrian economics, methodology and epistemology, and philosophy in general. Tactics and strategy are less appealing to me, in part because I am leery of their corrupting influence; in part because it is not my strong suit. But I felt I had to write on IP because I had pondered it and knew a lot about it from my practice. So I did, and it became controversial, provocotive, and influential, even though it was never my strongest interest or passion (either as libertarian or lawyer–as lawyer I always preferred other practice areas like family law or oil & gas law).

So the first few years after my initial major IP article (2000), I tried to play down the IP stuff and not be “Mr. IP”. But I started relenting, in part because I realized this area was a neglected one, was crucially important, and that there was still much more to figure out. So I have continued to write in this area, and have seen that it integrates into and enlightens many other areas of libertarian inquiry. Last year I established the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF), to permit further study of IP law and its damaging role to rights, society, and innovation.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I am working on a greatly expanded version of my Against Intellectual Property, tentatively entitled Copy This Book, and also on a book tentatively entitled The Ethics of Action: Fundamentals of Libertarian Legal Theory.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
I am a realist, but try not to be a pessimist. On one level I only hope to improve myself and my ideas, and make friends with people I admire and respect, and to learn from and profit from them. I also hope to nudge the discussion in what ways I can in the direction of liberty. I think that even though it seems an uphill battler, it’s important to fight anyway. This is important to me: to have done all I can in our social context to fight for liberty. I think humanity will someday achieve significantly greater degrees of liberty. I hope it comes in the next few decades, but even if it’s 500 years away, I want to fight for the right side.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Yes. Do not focus on short-term goals; this way discouragement lies. Have principles and integrity. Do the right thing, and fight for truth and liberty, because it is right, even if it seems to be an uphill battle. But I would say: live a good life. Enjoy it. Think hard before becoming altruistic. And as I noted in “Nock and Leonard Read on “One Improved Unit” and the Power of Attraction“, your primary task is to improve yourself–to strive for excellence in yourself. Then you become a bright light that attracts people; they see you are good, and successful, and worth emulating or listening to–so you win people over by the power of attraction. They come to you, and then you have more success spreading the ideas of liberty than if you go around being a pest.

See Stephan Kinsella’s articles
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See Stephan Kinsella’s media

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at andrewcain@mises.com

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (visit his website) is the author of 11 books, including two New York Times bestsellers: Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. His other books include the just-released Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, and The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy.

If you weren’t a scholar, what do you think you would be doing for a career now? Do you have any hobbies?
I don’t know. I’ve always imagined myself doing some kind of academic work. I initially expected to teach math, of all things. I was co-captain of the high school math team, and was a member of the Eastern Massachusetts All-Star Team both junior and senior year. (There was a time in my life in which I would not have brought this up…) It seemed a natural fit for me. Then I met the math majors in college, and in their spare time they read books on number theory. In my spare time I enjoyed reading about a lot of other things. Eventually I decided history was a better fit for me, because I liked being engaged in the world of ideas.  As for hobbies, I do enjoy chess and used to play in tournaments on Long Island, but it’s hard to find the time these days.

What drew you to the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Austrian school?
I saw a magazine ad (yes, that’s how long ago it was) for the Mises University summer program, which I attended in 1993. A lengthy list of recommended reading accompanied the required readings; with the help of my university library I sought out pretty much all of it. I was hooked. The event itself was the icing on the cake. It was the most significant event of my entire intellectual development. That was the first time I got to see Murray Rothbard in person, by the way. I saw him several other times after that. At one point he insisted I call him Murray, which I could barely bring myself to do.

How do you feel about recent events in relation to libertarianism? Do you think libertarianism is progressing? If so, in what direction?
We are still a small minority, to be sure, but we are growing faster than ever before, and the Austrian position is reaching mainstream audiences to an extent I never expected to see. I find it interesting that it is not merely free-market economics in general but the Austrian School in particular that is attracting so much attention. That isn’t to say that other approaches have disappeared; in academia they are very much alive. But from what I can see, among grassroots libertarians the Austrians have routed all competitors. In light of the demand, I put up the resource LearnAustrianEconomics.com.

You have some upcoming history courses on the new Mises Academy system. What are these courses about, and what do you hope to achieve with them?
On March 7th I’ll begin offering the first of what I hope will be a series of survey courses in American history, given from what Jeff Tucker calls an Austro-Jeffersonian perspective. This eight-week course will begin with the colonial period and continue through the ratification of the Constitution. I want to give people a painless – and, I hope, even enjoyable – way to learn U.S. history, and alongside like-minded people whose questions and discussion topics will likely dovetail with their own.

Beginning March 14th I’ll be offering my seven-week course on the New Deal for a second time. (I discuss the course in this Mises Daily and in this video.) This is an area of history people need to know cold. Even today we hear appeals to the intervention of the 1930s as an example to be emulated. I want students to be able to go beyond the libertarian talking points we all know and learn in detail why the standard version of events is so vulnerable to revision. Put less delicately, I want them to be able to smash the story we all learned in junior high, and put forth a vigorous alternative based on some of the best new research.

Can you tell us about your latest project?
My new book is called Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse. It could just as easily have been called Everything Should Be Abolished, and Here’s Why. It uses the coming fiscal crisis, which it describes in detail, as a jumping-off point to subject the various claims government makes for itself – e.g., we’d all die agonizing deaths if program X were abolished – to the most withering attacks I can muster. Jeff Tucker wrote a great overview of it. My publisher has made a free chapter available. It’s the most relentless assault on the state and its pretensions I am capable of writing.

See Thomas E. Woods’ articles
See Thomas E. Woods’ books
See Thomas E. Woods’ literature
See Thomas E. Woods’ media

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at andrewcain@mises.com

Wendy McElroy is the author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (St. Martin’s Press,1995), Sexual Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women, (McFarland, 1996), The Reasonable Woman: A Guide to Intellectual Survival (Prometheus Books, 1998), and Queen Silver: The Godless Girl (Prometheus Books, 2000), and Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century (McFarland, 2001). Her most recent book is a new anthology, Liberty for Women, (Ivan R. Dee, 2002). Her book on prostitution, Le Gambe Della Liberta, has just been published in Italian by the publisher Leonardo Facco.

She is the editor of Freedom, Feminism and the State (1st ed., Cato, 1983; 2nd ed., Holmes & Meier, 1991), which provides a historical overview of individualist feminism in America. A portion of the Preface is provided to render a better sense of this tradition and where it fits in with the more general feminist movement. Individualist Feminism: Part One, and Individualist Feminism: Part Two

McElroy has also compiled Index to Liberty: 1881-1908, a comprehensive index to Benjamin Tucker’s 19th century periodical, which can be accessed through the Memory Hole Website — under the category of individualist anarchism. Bibliographic Essay to Individualist Feminism is also located on this site. Her recent work, The Debates of Liberty, is expected to be issued by Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield).

She is a weekly columnist for FoxNews.com, writing under the title “The ifeminist” — a column that is widely reposted on the Internet. She is the editor of the feminist website ifeminists.com which grows by approximately 10% each month. McElroy is also a research fellow at the Independent Institute, and contributing editor to Ideas on Liberty (formerly The Freeman), The New Libertarian, Free Inquiry, and Liberty magazines. Her writing has appeared in such diverse periodicals as National Review, Marie Claire, and Penthouse.

For over a decade, McElroy was a series editor for Knowledge Products. She has written and edited many documentary scripts for audio cassette, some of which were narrated by Walter Cronkite, George C. Scott, and Harry Reasoner.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
My favorite hobby is cooking, especially ethnic food. Years ago, my husband and I moved from a big city to a farm that is down a gravel road with the nearest town containing fewer than 500 people. One of the few big city niceties my husband missed was the selection of ethnic food, especially Mexican. Thus, Mexican was the first cuisine I ‘mistressed’ in order to get the man’s blood-salsa level back to where it belonged.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I was drawn to both by the inimitable economist and historian Murray Rothbard.

I believe most libertarians enter the movement from one of two directions or concerns: civil liberties or free market economics. My overwhelming focus was civil liberties. Although I understood there was no difference in kind between civil and economics rights – that is, they are both expressions of the ‘human’ right to person and property — I found economics to be quite dull. Indeed, those who entered from the direction of economics seemed to have a personality type that was more subdued, retiring, dry. This was an unfair judgment but one to which I do admit.

Then I read Murray and, then, I met him. He sparkled. He made economics sparkle. More importantly, his arguments were a perfect marriage of civil rights and economic liberty so that it has become impossible for me to divorce the two from any issue I now examine. This is true even of issues that are traditionally non-economic. For example, when I consider domestic violence, I heavily factor in economic considerations such as who’s definition is being used? Does the definer profit in some manner? -perhaps by being part of what has been called the “Domestic Violence Industry?” I now consider any treatment of civil liberties that does not include an economic analysis to be incomplete and ‘economic types’ no longer seem dull to me.

Murray also cultivated within me a lifelong passion for 19th century individualist anarchism. He had the discernment to discard what was flawed within Benjamin Tucker et al – specifically, the acceptance of a labor theory of value – and to embrace their analysis of the state.

It was a heady mixture. But more than this, it was a systematic and integrated world view in which Austrian economics played a key role.

Thus, the Mises Institute had the immediate appeal of being home to Murray; and, where the ‘bow tie’ went, a lot of us followed. Mises also had (and has) the rare talents of Lew Rockwell, who combines an eloquent understanding of the ideas with unusual administrative skill. This makes for a principled and well-oiled institute. I do not always agree with those principles – for example, I am adamantly anti-voting – but Mises has always tolerated such disagreements.

Who is your greatest inspiration?

In terms of a single person, the foregoing answer captures him.

In broader terms, however, my greatest inspiration has been the 19th century individualist anarchist movement and most specifically Tucker. In my early twenties, I worked days and, at night, I indexed Tucker’s periodical Liberty (1881-1908). After a year of nightly page-turning, it got so that I could predict the line Tucker would take on almost any issue and, then, I started to predict what his wording would be.

But it wasn’t merely Tucker with whom I felt an intellectual affinity, of course. It was the cluster of luminaries whom he called mentors (Spooner, Greene, Warren) as well as the up-and-comers who called Tucker mentor in turn (Yarros, Byington).

I am currently going through a microfilm run of Auberon Herbert’s periodical The Free Life, and I am more impressed by its quality than I expected. My former exposure to the British individualist Herbert – famous for popularizing the term ‘Voluntaryist’ – was largely through exchange of debate within Liberty with his American counterparts. I thought Herbert argued well but I underrated him. Last month, I finished reading a series of his commentaries that, taken collectively, constitute the single best refutation of Georgism I can imagine. The Free Life has changed my mind on several points of theory, which is no mean feat.

How is libertarianism viewed within the feminist movement? Is it seen as a viable political philosophy which can help progress the rights of women?

The movement has become a large enough umbrella to include schools like libertarian feminism or, more broadly, individualist feminism. This is an encouraging development over the last few decades.

The dominant school, however, is still ‘gender’ feminism which is politically correct and far-left leaning. They consider the free market to be one of the twin pillars of the patriarchal system that is, in turn, the oppressor of women. They also approach politics almost exclusively on the basis of class analysis and class interests. Predictably, an individualist feminist who touts the free market and reduces politics to individual rights is usually dismissed, accused of being a shill for male power, or otherwise treated with contempt. It can become a mite unpleasant. (By the way, I do not mean to discard ‘class analysis’; it plays an essential role in libertarian theory but a very different one than it does in gender feminism. Libertarian class analysis does not denigrate the supreme importance of individuals.)

On the other hand, libertarianism has produced wonderful female scholars, such as Ellen Frankel Paul, and an impressive body of supporting work in feminism. (Please see an anthology I edited entitled Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century for a sense of the richness and breadth of scholarship.) The last several years has seen an increasing acceptance of individualist feminism within academia; every month or so, I receive permission requests to reprint one of my pieces in a textbook or to have an article included in course handouts. Again, encouraging.

It will take quite awhile, however, for the zeitgeist of gender feminism to be lifted from the movement. Gender feminism has institutionalized itself within society through laws and within academia through Women’s Studies Departments.

Do you have any new works on the way?

Yes I do. For better or worse, however, I rarely discuss material on which I am actively working. Given how many parties I’ve attended at which authors sit and read aloud their manuscripts-in-progress, this is not necessarily a character flaw.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?

I have so many answers to this one question. Let me chose just one. I wish to be among those who reclaim and sustain two neglected traditions: individualist anarchism and individualist feminism.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?

Yes, but I would pass on the advice to libertarians in general.

Be more interested in ideas than you are in being ‘right’. By this I do not mean you should cease to pass judgment on ideas or cease to pursue the truth. But ideas are intrinsically interesting and you can learn a great deal from those with whom you disagree. Some of the best ruling class analysis out there comes from left wing historians.

My second piece of advice is a corollary of the first. Do not presume that people who are ‘wrong’ are less intelligent, less decent or well-informed than you. For many years, my BFF was an old-fashioned labor union socialist who kept hoping libertarianism was a phase through which I would pass. We had strong points of political agreement as well, of course, including a belief in free speech absolutism and anti-war activism. She was one of the most intelligent, kind-hearted, and well-read people I’ve ever known. When we disagreed, she did not suddenly become stupid, coarse and ignorant. She was the same human being; we simply disagreed.

See Wendy McElroy’s articles
See Wendy McElroy’s literature

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at andrewcain@mises.com

Richard K. Vedder is professor of economics at Ohio University. He is also the co-author of Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America and Poverty, Income Distribution and the Family, and Public Policy and the American Economy in Historical Perspective.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
In my free time, I read a lot, and I also travel a good deal. In 2010, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean eight times, more on pleasure than on business. I used to do mostly serious reading, and, I still like to read good books done by writers with a classical liberal perspective, but for therapy I read a fair amount of light fiction as well.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
In graduate school, I had a small exposure to Hayek, but my exposure to Austrian economics was modest until around 1980. In the late 1970s, Lowell Gallaway and I started doing empirical analysis that led to results highly congenial to Austrians. We met Murray Rothbard at an IHS/Liberty Fund program in California in 1983, and he liked a paper we had written on unemployment. That led to a very long paper for the first issue of the Review of Austrian Economics (now QJAE), and, ultimately, to our book Out of Work published first in the early 1990s. Murray and Lew Rockwell started inviting me to the Mises University and my appreciation of Austrian ideas grew with that of the students.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
Many economists have inspired me, ranging from Austrians such as Mises himself to other economists who largely espouse a classical liberal viewpoint,albeit one different than that of Austrians, such as Milton Friedman. I sometimes think that in accentuating differences, scholars on the right engage in unproductive contretemps that detract from focusing on the real source of most evil, namely those wanting to use governments and central banks to manipulate us, deprive us of our liberty, and lower the quality of our lives.

There has been a recent up tick in the US unemployment rate. Is this just the beginning of a possible upsurge in unemployment?
Putting aside the destructive monetary policies of the Fed, which are awful, and putting aside even the completely ineffective and potentially inflationary federal stimulus policies, and even putting aside the devastation to be caused by the socializing of health care, the unemployment rate has been bumped up 2 to
3 percentage points –maybe even more–by the continuing extension of unemployment benefits. Mainstream economists said decades ago what Austrians already knew, namely that this form of labor market interference will have severe unintended consequences, which we are seeing now.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I have been working a lot on the economics of higher education, and have finished a book that argues governmental interferences into this sector has made universities expensive, ineffective and destructive of economic growth. Naturally, university presses are showing reluctance in publishing it, so I am pursuing other options. I also am attacking current administration policies everywhere I can, from op-eds to even congressional testimony.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
I hope that in time my work influences the view of younger scholars and, once in a while, even thoughtful politicians (if there is such a specie). I do what I do at a furious pace because I believe what I say is true and that if I convince others of that, the world would be a bit better off.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
I have written on this previously. Sometimes there is a bit of a balancing act that has to be performed –if students push their Austrian ideas too hard, they sometimes have trouble getting jobs,particularly in academia. Yet, in the long run, I think the Austrian approach will gain more adherents, so young scholars should not become overly discouraged.

See Richard Vedder’s articles
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Art Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Business at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, a weekly columnist for Forbes.com, and a regular contributor to the Mises Economics Blog. He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, a member of the Mises Institute’s Adjunct Faculty, and a member of the Board of Scholars of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. He has taught at Institute for Humane Studies Summer Seminars since 2008 and taught at Mises University in 2009. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Summer 2008 and 2009, and he was a graduate fellow at the Mises Institute in 2003. His areas of interest include Southern economic history, development economics, and the impact of Walmart. His research has appeared in the Journal of Urban Economics, Public Choice, Contemporary Economic Policy, Business and Politics, Economic Affairs, the Review of Austrian Economics, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and numerous other outlets.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
My wife and I have two kids in diapers, so there isn’t really much in the way of “free time.” Still, I enjoy reading, writing, good food, and watching college football (the latter is a habit I’m trying to break). I started studying karate when I came to Rhodes, and while I’ve earned a red belt I haven’t been able to continue my training since the kids came along. I hope to earn my black belt by the end of Spring semester, though. I try off-and-on to become a semi-sort-of-serious runner, and I’ve run a few 5ks. I also do some side writing on personal productivity and have had a series of columns published at Lifehack.org and in Productive! magazine. I’m working on expanding this in collaborative projects with the Institute for Humane Studies and the Womack Company.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
One of my professors at the University of Alabama knew of my libertarian leanings and suggested I attend Mises University. I couldn’t because I was in the marching band in college, but I did a bit of reading on my own and attended the 2001 Austrian Scholars’ Conference. When I got to Washington University in Saint Louis for graduate school, I saw that one of the research centers on campus had cleaned out its library and had left a ton of books in the mailroom for anyone who wanted them. I was able to get Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, Gerald O’Driscoll’s Economics as a Coordination Problem, and Ludwig Lachmann’s Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process. I printed Human Action off of mises.org chapter-by-chapter and read it on my walks to and from school and in my spare time. I finally went to the Rothbard Graduate Seminar and Mises University in 2002. I find that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, so I taught a summer course at Wash U in 2003 called “Explorations in Austrian Economics.” I worked as a teaching and research assistant for 1993 Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North from 2002-2005. During this time, he was teaching a freshman seminar using The Economic Way of Thinking and team-teaching (with John Drobak) an upper-level/law school course called “Theory of Property Rights.” He was also finishing his 2005 book Understanding the Process of Economic Change, which was considerably influenced by Hayek. I remember Professor North saying that Hayek was the most important economist of the twentieth century.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
I can name several. Mises because he never gave up, even after being hunted by the Nazis. Indeed, I told my students on the last day of class this past Fall that on the days when I feel like the whole world is against me or when things just don’t go my way, I think about the courage of Mises and so many others like him whose lives were sought by maniacs and tyrants. The Civil Rights Museum in Memphis has a very moving (and fascinating) exhibit on the Montgomery Bus Boycott. People died for translating the Bible into English. John Bunyan spent years in prison. Chinese Christian leader Watchman Nee died in one of Mao’s labor camps. These examples help me try (albeit not always successfully) to focus on things that really matter. Among scholars today, Douglass North and John Nye were mentors who helped me learn how to ask big questions. I also take my approach to scholarship from Deirdre McCloskey, who has spent an entire career asking and answering very important questions. Within the economic history profession, Price Fishback and Robert Margo exhibit the kinds of virtues one wants in senior scholars.

How important is ethics in relation to economic theory and the progression of free-market ideals?
Ethical reflection is extremely important, and it’s one thing that motivates me. For example, I got interested in Southern economic history in part because I wanted to understand how such obviously appalling and immoral systems as chattel slavery and Jim Crow persisted for so long. As a Christian I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersections between ethics and economics. I agree with those like Paul Heyne and Steve Horwitz who have argued that it is the ethicists who need to take economics seriously. Compassion is very important, but it is insufficient. One of the great contributions economics makes to ethics is to show that a lot of our grand schemes and charitable endeavors actually do more harm than good. I think it is a very stunted (and immature) morality that doesn’t take economics seriously.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I have a handful of Walmart papers in the pipeline. I’m also working on a series of papers about racist violence and Southern economic history. These have been in various stages of completion for several years. I’m also working on a handful of book projects. I’m working on combining some of my published academic work into a book on the social role of profit and some of my published popular work into a book on day-to-day economics. The Walmart research will turn into a book eventually. I have two super-large projects I want to finish if I live to be 90. The first is the definitive economic history of the South. The second is a treatise on social science tentatively titled The Possibility of Civilization.
On the popular front, I have my weekly contributions to Forbes and my twice-weekly(ish) contributions to the Mises Blog. In 2011, I’m going to try to make better use of Twitter. I’m also doing some professional development writing and speaking for the Institute for Humane Studies and exploring a periodic collaboration with the Womack Company on personal productivity.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
I want my work to lead to a freer, richer world. I’m motivated by a handful of things. The first is a source of what Bill Hybels calls “holy discontent.” I see a lot of places where I can contribute. The second is my family. I was radicalized again when our son was born in 2008, and this was redoubled when our daughter was born this past summer. The third is the conviction that people are morally significant for their own sake. This probably isn’t the time or the place for an extended theological discussion, but as a Christian, I’m of the view that people are valuable to God. Therefore, they are valuable to me. Someday, my children will learn about the horrors people have visited upon one another. When they ask “what did you do about it?”, I want to be able to give a better answer than “change the channel.”

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
I agree with Benjamin Powell–I thought we were the next generation! As my cohort approaches tenure and positions of leadership within the profession, we’re realizing that we aren’t the new guys anymore. We got here by going to conferences, meeting people, being alert to and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise, and putting in a lot of hours grappling with blinking cursors and blank computer screens. A lot of opportunities have come my way because I’ve been in the right place at the right time.

Do careful, applied research with an eye to the Big Issues. Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” is essential, and it is worth re-reading occasionally. He suggests that scientists and scholars should always be working with an eye to how their research addresses the most important problems out there. Borrowing from Hamming, we should always ask “what is the most important question in my field? How does my research help answer it?”

Write a lot, take the time to find your scholarly voice and your public voice, and develop styles that are appropriate for different audiences. This takes a lot of very, very hard work, and I’ve found that reviewing books is a good way to practice reading appreciatively (if critically) and to practice writing. Two of the best guides I’ve seen are Deirdre McCloskey’s Economical Writing (which I discuss here) and Michael Munger’s essay on writing in the IHS publication “Scaling the Ivory Tower” (PDF here; here’s a version of Munger’s article aimed at faculty members that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education). The tone I take in a Forbes article about a controversial issue is going to be different from the tone I take in a book review for The Freeman. This is in turn different from the style I use in an academic article. Write to instruct, not to enrage: if you feel the urge to write “sheeple,” resist.

Be ready and willing to learn from anyone and everyone, and listen (or read) carefully, charitably, and appreciatively. Be aware of your own biases. Reading Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson has done a lot for me in this respect. Seek empathy, and avoid the temptation to ascribe disagreements to idiocy or ill will. I’ve come to the conclusions I’ve reached by thinking hard about economics pretty much all day, every day since I first took introductory microeconomics in Fall 1997. When I was a child, I thought as a child, but every day is an effort to put aside childish things: I have, at one time or another, held a lot of the ideas and indulged a lot of the fallacies and errors I now criticize.

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Benjamin Powell works as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Suffolk University and is senior economist with the Beacon Hill Institute.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I’m into mountaineering and have climbed mountains all over the United States but also in Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I’m also very into wine. I’ve tasted in California, Oregon, Italy, Austria, and Australia and am working on building a nice wine cellar. I love sports, both participating and watching.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I was drawn to the Austrian school through my own readings while I was an undergrad. I first encountered Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and thought it was pretty good and then I found out that Hayek was his colleague so I read The Road to Serfdom. After that I found out Mises was his teacher and began reading some of his books and then I discovered Rothbard and was totally hooked. After arguing with my anti-market fellow students all semester in a comparative systems class my professor called me into his office to show me a fax he had received from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute announcing the Mises University and he suggested I might be interested given the types of arguments I made in class. So I first went to the Mises Institute in the summer of 1999. I left that seminar with no doubt in my mind what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to become the type of professor that many of the lecturers at Mises U were.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
Murray Rothbard. His vision of an overall science of liberty is inspiring. His life’s work that combined scholarship, activism, and mass education all with the aim of achieving a free society is something that should inspire all of us. I will say, that on the academic mentoring front, Peter Boettke is the person I most seek to
emulate. He does amazing work mentoring his students to become engaged academic scholars while pursuing radical libertarian and Austrian research programs.

In what ways is the Japanese recession much like the US recessions? Are there any major differences?
The first academic article I ever published was on Japan’s recession in the QJAE. There are some similarities between their recession and the current U.S. recession but also important differences. Both were partially fueled by excessive monetary creation. Both had massive real estate bubbles. After the collapse both pursued massive fiscal stimulus packages, eased monetary policy, and bailed out banks. But ultimately I think the scope for continued intervention in the United States is much smaller than it was for Japan in the 1990s. There simply won’t be the funds to support the type of decade long multistimulus approach Japan took. Also U.S. labor markets and capital are more flexible. So I expect that we’ll readjust and recover more quickly than Japan simply because the scope for the government to intervene and prevent recovery is smaller here. (see my piece “U.S. Recession Policy: Nothing New Under the (Rising) Sun” in the intercollegiate review for more on this)

Do you have any new works on the way?
I’m always working on lots of things but my major project right now is on a new book on sweatshops tentatively titled “No Sweat: How Sweatshops Improve Lives and Economic Growth.” I’ve got about half of
it drafted at this point. I wish progress were faster… perhaps it would be if someone locked me in a room with a computer, demanded I work 70 hours a week on it, and didn’t give me bathroom breaks.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
I hope to help change the minds of scholars and the public to desire a freer (radically freer) society. Academically I’m very interested in research on pushing the limits of markets and voluntary orderings to organize society without a government. I’m also very interested in what is necessary to generate lasting social change. But when thinking about my own research on a day to day basis, much of it is riven by what has angered me most recently. Rothbard once quipped that “Anger is my muse.” That is certainly true of me. Whatever the latest research or event was that angered me often dictates the next topic I work on.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Ha. I thought I was part of the next generation! Did I get old recently? What I can say for those coming behind me, based on my limited experience so far, is that doing Austrian economics and libertarian research is not an impediment to professional success. As long as you are doing applied research that other economists are concerned with you can make Austrian and libertarian points and have a successful academic career. Personally I’ve found that when I work on topics like applied anarchism I’ve had better luck publishing that in
well respected mainstream journals than I have with less radical topics. I think the same is true of most of my peers. Some institutes and scholars give advice to “hide your libertarianism and make something else the focus of your scholarly research.” I don’t think those people could be any more wrong. The time is great for
young libertarian and Austrian economists. I hope more will join us in the development and application of the science of liberty.

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Pierre Desrochers is a professor of geography at University of Toronto. His research interests are economic development, technological innovation, business-environment interactions, energy policy and food policy.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I swim and I hit the gym as regularly as I can. I’m also something of a radio and TV pundit, a “hobby” that typically requires me to perform additional research on a range of subjects that fall outside the purview of my academic work. Other than that, I do little things, but nothing that really involves a routine.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I developed an interest in economic development before entering the university system, but my original encounter with mainstream economics was not very compelling. I guess I could never get over the gut feeling that you’re solving the wrong problem if you assume away reality. Besides, I distinctly remember the Marxist professor from whom I took the Quebec equivalent of Econ 101 saying in his last lecture that he could easily debunk all the material he had been mandated to teach us. My political sensibilities were strongly to the left at the time, so I ended up majoring in political science in order to do old-fashioned political economy.

In time, however, personal experiences with labor unions and public bureaucracies (among other things, I paid for my undergraduate education by “working” as a part-time customs officer…) increasingly convinced me of the value of political and economic freedom. As a young Québécois in the pre-internet age, however, I was never going to be introduced to the Austrian school in a formal academic context or through then non-existing policy think tanks, websites and blogs (things are now much better with well-established institutions such as the Montreal Economic Institute http://www.iedm.org/e and Le Québécois Libre http://quebecoislibre.org/, two intellectual ventures to which I contributed a little a while back). If I remember correctly, my big intellectual break was reading “Les vrais penseurs de notre temps” (The True Thinkers of our Time), a book by French intellectual Guy Sorman http://gsorman.typepad.com/guy_sorman/ which featured short intellectual portraits of academicians and writers he found fascinating. It so happens that the two economists he discussed were Hayek and Rothbard. My recollection of the book is that Sorman used Rothbard as a foil to make Hayek look reasonable, so I began reading Hayek and never really thought of looking up Rothbard’s work.

A few years later, I found my way to a Mises Institute conference after co-writing an essay on political secession with my friend Éric Duhaime http://blogues.canoe.ca/ericduhaime/ who is now arguably Quebec’s most prominent free-market pundit. I still remember Éric and I wondering what we had gotten ourselves into when we saw a picture of Rothbard on the wall (this was just after he had passed away). I later had the opportunity to attend Mises University a few times. I had already begun a PhD in economic geography, but in the end my dissertation incorporated a lot of material learned at Mises U. I didn’t realize it then, but I was enrolled in one of the few geography programs where I could get away with doing something like this. I will be eternally grateful to my advisor and PhD committee at the Université de Montréal for putting
up with me (and for probably having to apologize to the rest of the profession about this a few times since then…).

Who is your greatest inspiration?
As far as my research interests and style go, the late urban theorist Jane Jacobs. She was the antithesis of the type of professional intellectual I was once planning to become: highly specialized and writing only for a small audience of similarly trained individuals. Because she had no professional credentials, Jacobs had no compunction to borrow, break down and recombine ideas and insights from a wide array of individuals, perspectives, and disciplines in order to understand why some cities grow while others stagnate and decay. While her lack of expertise did lead her astray on a number of issues, she was able to shed new light on old problems and suggest highly original departures from the then conventional wisdom among experts. It is because of her that I became a geographer in the first place. Of course, I eventually learned and borrowed much from Austrian economists and contributed a little to the tradition, but most of what I still do at this point in time in terms of research and teaching owes more to Jacobs than to Austrian economists.

One of your works in QJAE concerns geography and economic development, can you tell us what kind of Austrian insights can be brought to your field of geography or vice versa?
The branch of economic geography that attracted me specializes in understanding regional economic development. Contributors to this literature took entrepreneurship, technological change and social networks much more seriously than mainstream economists did. Another appealing characteristic of the field was the widespread assumption that the way to learn about these things was to get out of the ivory tower and go talk to people. Like most non-economists, however, economic geographers are typically averse to methodological individualism and somewhat lacking in their overall appreciation of market processes. I have tried to blend the best and most relevant aspects of both intellectual worlds and apply them to a rather broad range of topics. For instance, I’m currently putting the final touch to a piece on a 19th century industrial waste recycling exhibit to be published by a journal edited by the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) that pretty much debunks the standard history of industry-environment interactions. I’m revising the proofs of a piece that explains how a diversified economy makes people more creative and researching the history of the American environmental movement between the end of the Second World War and the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the early 1960s. I’m also completing with my wife (an economist…) a book against the “locavore” fad (i.e., the idea that increasing purchases of locally produced food beyond its economic rationale will be good for the environment, the economy and overall food security) that gave me the opportunity to borrow much from the work of anthropologists, public health specialists, nutritionists, geographers, economists, business historians and a few other academics, along with the opportunity to revisit a number of classics from Plato to John Locke (everybody has had an opinion on food policy it seems). Believe it or not, Austrian insights and things I learned at Mises U. proved valuable in all projects.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
I’m naturally attracted to the grey areas between academic disciplines where I think the most interesting problems are. Although this is presumptuous on my part, I like to think of myself as something of a “bridge builder” between different intellectual communities (of course, the bridge might be not very pretty or impressive, but it does connect people who otherwise would interact even less with each other). Beyond that, another concern of mine is that, by and large, the new generation of human geographers is much more radical and less open to intellectual dissent than the previous one and that irrelevant work written in unreadable jargon is now much closer to being the norm than the exception. I want to believe that by writing policy relevant things that appeal to a broad audience I will lead by example and help reverse this tide somewhat.
(By the way, if readers want to a glimpse of my research, they can look up my webpage http://
epsem.erin.utoronto.ca/desrochers/research.htm )

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
My career path was somewhat unusual and I am not sure what conclusions can be drawn from it, at least inasmuch as I believe that the department where I got my PhD and the one where I am currently employed are much more tolerant of an oddball like me than most other places in my discipline. Maybe I was just lucky. But then again, I never pretended to be something I was not. I worked hard, tried to be creative and be the best colleague I could be, so it was perhaps normal that I would end up in places where I feel comfortable intellectually and socially despite my heterodox leanings. Truth be told, being employed as a geographer gave me complete freedom to pursue whatever topic I found interesting and, perhaps unwisely, I never really cared about academic fads or where I would end up publishing my research. I probably shouldn’t recommend that kind of reckless approach to young people. On the other hand, to students who would rather dare being different than play it safe, I would suggest finding topics that are of interest to both you and other people outside of your own intellectual choir and be the best you can be. With a little luck, you will find your niche and most certainly be professionally happier that way.

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Paul F. Cwik is currently an Associate Professor of Economics in the department of management and human resources at Mount Olive College. He earned a B.A. from Hillsdale College, Michigan, an M.A. from Tulane University in Louisiana, and a Ph.D. from Auburn University in Alabama. He has taught classes at several colleges and universities such as Auburn University, Campbell University and Walsh College. He has presented academic papers to the Southern Economic Association, the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, the Prague Conference on Political Economy and at the Austrian Scholars Conferences. He has been published in academic journals that include: The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, New Perspectives on Political Economy: A Bilingual Interdisciplinary Journal, and Business Ethics: A European Review. He is also a reviewer of essays in Economic and Business History and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He has also published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
With two small children, there isn’t much free time in my life. However, I do enjoy swing dancing. I have been doing it for about ten years now. For a while I was a part of a competitive team called the MAD Hoppers. We did alright for a bunch of 30-somethings practicing in our spare time. Today, it is just a hobby that I try to get out to do once a week.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I didn’t really have much choice in the matter, for I have always been an Austrian economist. I attended Hillsdale College in the late-1980s / early-1990s. My principle teacher there was Richard Ebeling and he was absolutely instrumental in forming how I think about economic questions. At that time George Roche was the President of Hillsdale. I was fortunate to have taken a senior seminar class with him. There were the annual Ludwig von Mises Lecture series and Hillsdale also houses Mises’ personal library from when he lived in the US. (His European library and papers were confiscated by the Germans and then the Russians.) I was at Hillsdale when Ebeling discovered the lost papers in Moscow. It was a very exciting time to be an Austrian.

When I was a sophomore at Hillsdale, Richard Ebeling encouraged me to apply and attend the Mises Institute’s Mises University. It was held at Stanford University in 1990. I met Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Joe Salerno, David Gordon and many others that first year. I was fortunate to be able to return in 1991 and take the more advanced Austrian lectures. These were great times. The lectures were deep. The
evenings were full of debate and song. Yes, song. I remember singing old World War I anthems with Rothbard one evening.

When I graduated from Hillsdale, I enrolled in Tulane University’s Ph.D. program. They offered me so much money, I couldn’t say, “No.” I soon learned that it was a big mistake. The other students had no love for Austrian economics. In fact, they knew nothing of it. Furthermore, most of my classmates were from China and while they were good at the math, they cared very little for economics. They barely knew who Adam
Smith was or what he said. It was based on my love of Austrian economics and the Mises Institute that I left Tulane University and transferred to Auburn University. It was under Roger Garrison and Leland Yeager that I earned my Ph.D.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
My mentor is Richard Ebeling. He is brilliant. I can ask him almost any question and he will usually know the answer. He has a library that fills his house. There are books everywhere. The scary thing is not that he owns them, but he has read them, all of them. The scarier thing is that he can almost instantly recall whatever he has read and usually quote you what the author said and the page number!

This past summer, I was lecturing at FEE and we, four faculty members, went to dinner on the last evening. Of course some economic topic came up and I told the story of Richard Cantillon. I talked about the several theories of his death and the way in which the manuscript eventually got published. One of others looked at me and asked (indignantly), “How can you remember all that? Who do you think you are, Richard
Ebeling?” I took it as a high compliment.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that Mises is also a hero to me. He was one of the best economists in Europe and then he had to literally start over. After fleeing Europe from the Nazis, he arrives in the U.S. in August 1940, a month before his 59th birthday, and he has no career, not much of a reputation, few job prospects, and a wife to support.

I can only hope that I can accomplish a portion of what he did even though I face far fewer obstacles.

Your recent article was on the futility of social security. The upcoming GOP Congress has again promised to “privatize” social security. Do you hold out hope for this promise and if not what advice could you give for the average individual?
I am actually fairly pessimistic about the short-run and near term future. I think that politicians, as a group, will always compromise to take the path of least resistance. Everyone knows that social security is an impending disaster, but what will be done? Very little. The social security recipients are not going to give up their checks. The working populace is not going to put up with higher taxes. There is only so much money the government can borrow without exploding interest rates.

So what is the course of least resistance? Money creation. The government is able to create an infinite amount of money out of a big black hole of nothingness. Government has given itself this power and it is a terrible and awesome power. Money creation is at the center of so many of our economic ills that it is no wonder that Mises in the 1950s and ’60s spent so much time discussing inflation and tirelessly warning of its
consequences.

So the question is how best to avoid the negative inflationary effects. The best thing one could do is to be the first one to get the newly created money. So the government is the biggest winner. Then those who have the big, fat government contracts are the next big winners. As the money is diffused through the economy, the benefits turn into harms. Prices start to rise while many people have not yet received the new money. For
those people, their real wealth falls. Those on fixed incomes are hurt the most, closely followed by those with long term contracts.

Rothbard categorized citizens into two classes: net tax-payers and net tax-consumers. The first group pays more to the government than gets out of it and the second group gets more than it pays. If you are a part of the first group, you will want to become a part of the second. This is only natural. However, think about what this does to the long-term sustainability of our economy, our country and our way of life. It is for these reasons that I am pessimistic. As everyone tries to become a net tax-consumer, the system collapses.

However, I also know that since this is an untenable situation, and things must change, it can change for the better. Economic laws cannot be overridden by legislation. As a result, I am optimistic in the long-term. The free market always (eventually) finds a way around even the craziest rules and regulations. I suppose that to be a long-term optimist,it helps to have the truth on your side.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I am working on several things right now. I have been working on a series of articles all focusing on different aspects of the Business Cycle. My hope is to get them individually published and then to combine them into a useable introduction to Austrian business cycle theory. I would like it to be a supplement for principles and intermediate level teachers to use in the classroom along side the standard Macroeconomic textbooks.

I am also writing “articles” for my blog. Actually, it’s not my blog; it is Tillman School of Business’s blog which is open for any of our faculty to post. The thing is that I am the only one who is posting anything. So it is de facto, my blog. It is found here: http://tillmanspeaks.blogspot.com/

The articles I write for it are at a newspaper reading level (or maybe a little more) and are about 1200 words long. They are longer than a typical Op-ed. The most popular are my reviews of the Austrian Economics Reading Forum meetings at NC State University. In Spring 2010, we covered The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics edited by Dolan. It’s quite fun to see what was “modern” Austrian economics in 1974. This past semester (Fall 2010) we covered Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
You are not asking easy questions. I hope that my work converts people to Austrian economics. I hope that it changes enough minds that our civilization changes direction to a society that is based upon liberty, private property and sound money. I hope that people will come to realize that a market economy is the most peaceful, most equitable, most humane system for society, that it has generated more wealth for more people than any other system, ever. It has done all of this in a relatively short period of time, just a few hundred years.

I know that my work, alone, will not come close to accomplishing this. However, if I am able to influence a few people, and if they are able to influence a few more people, we can continue to grow this movement.

I am an optimist for the long-run future. With two small children, I have to be. Life would be too miserable otherwise.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
It is hard to believe that there is a generation of Austrian scholars younger than me. It seems like yesterday that I was the one in the audience listing to the professors. Twenty years have flown right by.

In these past 20 years, I have learned some things. Before marriage and kids, you have more time to read, think and write than you will for the many years that follow. (Maybe you’ll have that time again when you retire. I don’t know. Ask me in another 20 years.) For now, as an undergraduate, as a graduate student, before the responsibilities of life takes over, don’t waste your time. Read Mises and Rothbard. Read Hayek and Kirzner. Read the obscure and the well-known. Write notes in the margins as you read them. Create an idea book and list your thoughts about future papers you’d like to write. Don’t get sidetracked into thinking that you can remake the world and win every argument, but do believe that if you stay true to your principles and have an open and inquisitive mind, you can and will influence some people. And then those people will influence others, etc.

Mises was human, and he, too, would get depressed. In Notes and Recollections he said the following, “Occasionally I entertained the hope that my writings would bear practical fruit and show the way for policy. Constantly I have been looking for evidence for a change in ideology. But I have never allowed myself to be deceived. I have come to the realization that my theories explain the degeneration of a great civilization; they do not prevent it. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.” This is a profoundly sad statement.

Then he went on to write, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Bureaucracy, Human Action, Omnipotent Government, “Planning for Freedom,” Theory and History, and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science and dozens of essays, articles, public speeches and so on.

So, I guess I can sum up my advice as don’t waste your time doing things that won’t bear fruit. Your writings might not be for the present. They may be for future readers. So do good work that will stand the test of time. Austrians are very good at reading the works of those who have come before us. So don’t get caught up in fads of today, and look forward to the future because we have truth on our side.

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Shawn Ritenour is Professor of Economics at Grove City College and adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He earned a B. A. in economics from Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa and a Ph.D. in economics from Auburn University. He has held the Ruby Letsch-Roderique Chair of Economics at Southwest Baptist University and has served as visiting professor at the University of Angers in France. He has contributed to 15 Great Austrian Economists and A Noble Calling and has been published in American Journal of Economics and Sociology and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. His editorials have appeared in periodicals such as The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of one book, Foundations of Economics.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I spend time with my family. We are subscribers to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra so I attend concerts often. I like to read history, literature, and theology when I get the chance. We also like to watch classic cinema, mostly from the Hollywood studio era. I like to cook when I can. My life improved immensely when Jeff Tucker introduced me to Cooks Illustrated magazine. I serve our church as an elder which requires a significant time commitment. I have recently been spending a fair amount of time on my new blog http://foundationsofecon.blogspot.com/.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
As a sophomore economics major in college, I bought a copy of Mises’ Human Action through the old Conservative Book Club and began reading it on my own. I was immediately impressed and quickly found Mises’ exposition of the foundations of economic analysis thoroughly compelling. His rooting economics in real human action solidly confirmed for me that economics was something worth pursuing as a vocation. I was convinced that praxeology was the way to do economics and then began reading more and more Mises. I found Human Action pretty stiff going in parts, so I checked out the collection of essays Planning for Freedom from our school’s library and read through them in my spare time. One of my college professors introduced me to the Mises Institute by giving me a few issues of The Free Market. When I decided to pursue graduate studies in economics, it was natural for me to apply to Auburn University because of its economics program’s close proximity to and relationship with the Mises Institute.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
That is hard to say. Many people have inspired me in different ways. The hard work my Dad endured in a meat packing plant for 20 years and then as a sole proprietor selling barbecue for the sake of he and his family is a great example to me. I’ve always been drawn to people who have accomplished tremendous things against tremendous odds as a result of staying true to their convictions. That is why I’ve always found the example of J. Gresham Machen, one of the founders of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, inspiring. Certainly Ludwig von Mises has been my greatest inspiration as I approached my calling in economics. Every time I read his intellectual memoir, Notes and Recollections I am encouraged to be a better economist, scholar, and teacher. I thought and felt the same way while reading Hulsmann’s tremendous Mises: the Last Knight of Liberalism.

You have a work coming out called Foundations of Economics, can you explain what your work is centered on?
It is an introductory economics treatise that develops economics in a Misesian, praxeological framework. When Rothbard set out to write, Man, Economy, and State, his original goal was to write an introductory work that sort of “boiled down” Mises’ Human Action in a way that made sound economics more accessible to more people. I took that approach with the intention of writing a book that provides a very readable and clear introduction to economics from the ground up. Anyone who reads it will see repeatedly that I draw heavily on Mises and Rothbard.

At the same time, I wanted to demonstrate that developing economics within a praxeological framework is thoroughly compatible with Christian doctrine as it relates to creation, man, and ethics.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
I hope that whoever reads it will have a good understanding of the reality of basic economic laws and how they apply to various economic problems with which we are challenged. I also hope to dispel the myth that good economics is somehow antithetical to Christian doctrine. Many Christians unfortunately find the free market suspect for various reasons. I hope that by reading my work, they will begin to take seriously the idea that economic law is part of the created order and hence, must be embraced and reconciled with Christian ethics.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
I am afraid any words of wisdom I might offer sound pretty trite. Pursue the truth and do honest scholarship. Read as much as you can. Be passionate about your vocation, but do not let emotions that stem from ideology overwhelm your ability to do good scholarship. One thing my professor Leland Yeager told me that has always stuck with me is that an economist’s first job is to get the analysis straight. It is not to be a cheerleader. Before successfully offering pronouncements on policy, a good scholar must correctly understand the economic theory that applies to the case at hand.

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George Bragues is the head of the business program at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Canada.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
Even though reading is part of my job, it is definitely something I love to do in my free time as well. I enjoy keeping up with the newspapers, magazines like The Economist, as well as books from a variety of disciplines, whether it be economics, politics, history, theology, philosophy, or finance. When I’m not reading, I enjoy watching sports, my favorites being hockey, football, and soccer. A follower of the ancient Greek ideal that one should keep both mind and body fit, I like to work out regularly at the gym and play soccer. Indeed, the latter has become a passion of mine over the last few years.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
While I am no mathophobe, I have to admit that the absence of mathematics in the Austrian approach to economics was the main draw for me. I appreciate the way mathematical techniques can add rigor to the analytic task, but human affairs are far too complex and unpredictable to be of much use other than to clarify a limited set of concepts, like for example, the notion that an investment’s value is equal to the discounted value of its future cash flows. At the same time, some rigor is needed in order to avoid the impressionistic, idiosyncratic, and ideologically laden treatments all too common in the humanities. The deductive methodology of the Austrian tradition preserves the necessary rigor, while simultaneously avoiding the flights of theoretical imagination that bedevils mainstream mathematical economics. Coming to the Austrian school from a background in moral and political theory, I was very much attracted to the way Ludwig von Mises in Human Action defended his economic teaching against the challenges posed to it by various philosophical traditions, particularly historicism — which, to my mind, is the greatest obstacle in our time to the idea that the human mind can attain universal and objective truths. Economists all too often operate as if there are no other disciplines or ways of thinking that impinge on their subject-matter. With Mises, I had found someone who understood the challenge posed to economics by other philosophic traditions and the necessity of confronting them. And it is because the Ludwig von Mises Institute is dedicated to preserving and promoting this Misesian approach that I was attracted to it.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
My father. He died when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. He was relatively young, only 52, when it happened. It made me recognize just how important it is not to waste any of the brief time we get in this life. So I promised that I would not let all the sacrifices he made for me be in vain and that I would accomplish as much as I can to make him proud.

Many economists look at the mechanics of the Fed but you choose to look at the ethics of the institution. What were your ethical conclusions on the institution and their policies?
Because people readily disagree in their moral evaluations, I tried to see if I could generate a moral consensus on the Fed’s policies from a set of divergent moral traditions, namely, Aristotle’s virtue theory, Locke’s natural rights teaching, Kant’s deontology, and Bentham/Mill’s utilitarianism. In evaluating the Fed’s response to the recent financial crisis, which has essentially consisted in the mass creation of liquidity, I found that three of the four moral theories rendered a negative moral judgment on the Fed’s very easy money strategy. These were the Aristotelian, Lockean, and Kantian approaches. The only approach that might feasibly provide the Fed with a moral defense is utilitarianism — which not uncoincidentally is the implicit moral philosophy of central bankers and orthodox economists. Utilitarianism states that an action is morally licit to the extent that it advances the net pleasure of individuals in society. Bernanke’s argument is, basically, that money creation is necessary to avoid a depression and all the pain that such a severe downturn causes. While I agree, in sympathy with Hayek’s position on the matter, that some liquidity infusion is required when a bubble pops, the Fed has gone much too far. It is hard to see how they will be able to avoid inflation, once the economy gains some traction and credit demand revives. Consequently, with three moral philosophies definitely against the Fed, and the other one arguably so as well, I conclude that the Fed’s current policy is immoral.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I am currently re-working a paper on L.A. Hahn’s theory of the stock market. He is very much an Austrian in his economic thinking and he offers an understanding of the financial markets that steers a middle path between the Efficient Markets Hypothesis championed by orthodox financial economists and the psychological approach originally advanced by Keynes and now advocated by Behavioral Finance. But the major project I am now beginning to pursue is a book on the confluence of politics and financial markets.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
With respect to the politics-financial markets project, I hope that people will gain a better appreciation of how political forces so often get in the way of the proper functioning of the stock, bond, and currency markets. I also hope to disseminate the idea that financial markets are a critical check on governments, if not the most powerful check available, more powerful even than the system of checks and balances originally envisioned as operating in democracies.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Since, for the foreseeable future, a scholar sympathetic to the Austrian tradition must oppose the Zeitgeist, I’d recommend the cultivation of intellectual courage above all else. Do not be afraid to challenge dominant assumptions.

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Robert Lawson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Finance at Auburn University. He is also a co-author of the widely-cited “Economic Freedom of the World” annual report which provides an economic freedom index for over 140 countries. He has publications in journals such as Public Choice, Cato Journal, Kyklos, Journal of Labor Research, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, and European Journal of Political Economy. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I am an avid runner. I’ve run many marathons, but I run trail ultra-marathons more often than road marathons these days. I also like mountaineering and peak-bagging. The highest peak (but not the hardest) I’ve scaled is Kilimamjaro which I did with Austrian economist Ben Powell a few years ago.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
With the encouragement of my undergraduate mentor, Richard Vedder, at Ohio University. I attended the second-ever Mises University (before it was even called Mises U!) at Stanford in 1987. Murray Rothbard was there and one of my fondest memories is of staying up very, very late in the evenings listening to him. I was too afraid to say anything myself but it was an honor to meet him. I also met my friend and eventual co-author Walter Block there, though he wouldn’t remember that meeting. In more recent years, I’ve come to self-identify as an Austrian in large part because of the influence of Ben Powell. During our many treks and mountain climbs he has convinced me that I am an Austrian even though I didn’t identify as such. I thought I
was just being a good economist. It turns out they’re the same thing!

Who is your greatest inspiration?
This is a hard question. At the risk of getting some hate mail from Walter Block, I have to say the dead economist I respect the most is Adam Smith. For his era, I am still amazed at how much he got right (and how little we’ve learned since then). Among living economists, it has to be my graduate mentor and now long-time collaborator, Jim Gwartney at Florida State. As many know, Jim has lost his eyesight in the the last years, and I am amazed and truly inspired by his work ethic and ability to persevere in the face of such a challenge.

How does the banning of consumer products interfere with the insights of the Austrian microeconomics?
Value is subjective right? Unlike too many economists, Austrians take the subjectivity of value seriously. If we observe someone buying something it must be because that person subjectively values that thing more than the cost (which is also subjective). If the state bans that sale, it has harmed that person. Period. It is easy to parrot the idea that value is subjective, but it is hard to consistently apply in practice. We all as humans (as opposed to Austrian economists) see people doing what we think are stupid things, and there is a natural instinct to want to stop them from doing this. This is natural as humans, parents, friends, etc. But as
economists, we can not substitute our vision of the good for another person’s. It’s simply against the rules of the discipline.

Do you have any new works on the way?
In addition to continuing my work on measuring economic freedom (www.freetheworld.com) I am starting a new line of work trying to measure restrictions on human travel (such as passports and visas) and more generally migration. It seems tragic to me that we have spent so much time extolling the virtues of free trade in goods but as a profession we have paid little or no time thinking about the restrictions in place limiting human mobility. We need to do more on this and I hope I can be a part of that.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
Honestly, I try not to think about this. To use an American football metaphor, I don’t think we should think too hard about getting to the endzone. Instead, focus on winning the little battles, that is on getting
first downs. If you win these you’ll score eventually. I have faith that if I do good work, it’ll help the cause of human liberty and prosperity, but I don’t think about the end goal as much as the means of getting there.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Yes! Please spend at least as much of your time, energy and talents fighting the socialists, leftists, etc. of the world as each other.

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Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and is the editor of Independent Review. He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and is also a contributor to LewRockwell.com. Higgs has held teaching positions at University of Washington, Lafayette College, and Seattle University.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I have no hobbies of the usual kind, and my free time is rather scarce because I am usually overcommitted to various projects – writing, editing, and speaking, for the most part. But my wife and I keep poultry as a sort of overgrown hobby. At present, we have 56 chickens, 8 ducks, and 6 geese, and a substantial amount of time is required each morning and each evening to care for them.

I also love many kinds of music, especially classical, and I greatly enjoy listening to music even though I am not a musician myself. During baseball season, I often watch the Seattle Mariners’ games on television in the evening.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I stumbled upon Hayek’s writing during the first year of my career as a professor (1968-69). Hayek’s references led me to read Mises’s Human Action several years later, and around the same time, I discovered Rothbard, Kirzner, and other Austrians. My transition from neoclassical to Austrian economist took many years, however, and I may still fall short of having become a card-carrying Austrian, at least in some people’s eyes. I’m still learning.

I found out about the Mises Institute when, in the late 1980s, Murray Rothbard invited me to join the editorial board of the Review of Austrian Economics. I have been writing for the institute’s publications and lecturing at its conferences from time to time ever since.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
Early in my training as an economist, I was inspired by Simon Kuznets and Douglass C. North. Soon afterward, I took considerable inspiration from Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and Armen Alchian and from economic historians such as Nathan Rosenberg, Robert Fogel, and Stanley Engerman, among others. Later still, Schumpeter, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, and James Buchanan exerted greater influence on my thinking. In retrospect, I regard Mises as the giant among these figures.

Your book, Crisis and Leviathan, has been quoted by many scholars as the definitive work on the growth of government in American history. What inspired you to write such a work and do you have any plans of updating it to the present day?
My first academic appointment, which stretched from 1968 to 1983, was in the department of economics at the University of Washington, where my colleague and department chairman was Douglass North. At that time, North was widely viewed as the leading authority among the economic historians with regard to the role of government in economic history. Over the years, he and I had countless discussions of this topic and related matters, even though my own research at the time dealt with other subjects. Eventually, around 1980, I decided to write my own book on the growth of government. During the five years or so that I worked mainly on this project, I broadened my initial plan for the book and deepened my knowledge of many related areas of history, law, and social science. The book was finally published in 1987.

I have no plans for updating Crisis and Leviathan, although several of my later books, especially Depression, War, and Cold War (2006), essentially amount to sequels in which I deal more fully with aspects of the topics I covered in the 1987 book, as well as with some new, related topics and with the more recent period of history.

Do you have any new works on the way?
Since I left academia, in 1994, I have found it difficult to write proper (coherent, well focused) books, so all of my books published during the past fifteen years are collections of essays. Some of these collections, such as Against Leviathan (2004) and Neither Liberty Nor Safety (2007), range widely; others, such as Resurgence of the Warfare State (2005) and Depression, War, and Cold War, have a narrower focus. I have made a plan for another collection, which would contain a number of my more substantial essays written in the past few years, but I have not yet decided whether to have this collection published.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
I hope that my work will contribute, if only in some tiny way, to professional and lay understanding of how the world works now and how it worked in the past. I currently spend a fair amount of my writing time (which is only a small part of my entire professional time) explaining and criticizing economic and foreign policies and striving to clarify people’s views of what is going on in the political economy. Whatever good, if any, this part of my writing may do, it is certainly ephemeral. One does not write op-ed articles “for the ages.”

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Study the writings of the great Austrians carefully, especially those of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard, but do not confine your study to the Austrian school or to economics alone. The greatest Austrians were men of extremely wide knowledge and understanding. This aspect of their intellects is one of the most important ways in which they distinguished themselves (greatly for the better) from the narrowly focused technicians and idiot savants who, to an appalling extent, pass as leading economists in the mainstream economics profession today.

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Peter Calcagno is an Associate Professor of Economics at the College of Charleston. He earned his B.S. in Economics and History from Hillsdale College and Ph.D. in Economics from Auburn University. Professor Calcagno has previously worked at Wingate University, Jacksonville State University, and Georgia State University. He is particularly interested in Public Choice Economics, and Political Economy. In 2008 he received the School of Business and Economics Distinguished Teaching Award. He is currently the founding director of the undergraduate program the Initiative for Public Choice & Market Process, which seeks to advance the understanding of the economic, political and moral foundations of a free society.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I like to read, cook, and I am a big college football fan.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I did my undergraduate work at Hillsdale College and there Austrian economics is the norm. I was extremely fortunate that Richard Ebeling was at Hillsdale while I was there and I had several classes with him including a course in Austrian economics, which the economics majors asked him to teach. I became aware of the Ludwig von Mises Institute while in college and went to my first Mises University in 1991. Richard served as a mentor and encouraged me to pursue a career in academics and guided me to Auburn University where I ended up a fellow with the Institute.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
Historically, Mises and Hayek’s work have been great inspiration for me as I continue to find new insights in reading their work. More contemporarily, I am inspired by some the younger Austrian scholars Peter Klein and Peter Boettke. They both demonstrate the future of Austrian economics and work to keep it at the forefront of the discussion.

Can you explain what PAC’s are and are they prevalent within the current administration?
PAC’s (political action committees) are the legal lobbying groups for firms and other special interests groups. As long as special interests dominate the political process PACs are relevant. The recent issue of earmarking is related as these groups seek special favor, and the more we move toward a rent-seeking society allowing unproductive or political entrepreneurship we see these groups grow and hold favor.

Do you have any works on the way?
I have an article on the causes of divided government at the state level. We find that increases in government spending results in voters to seek divided government, which is an encouraging finding.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
I hope to encourage new scholars and promote free markets by exposing them to Austrian economics and public choice theories. I hope to demonstrate that the political process is not the sollution to economic problems or improve economic well-being. The public choice theory demonstrates the problems with the political process and the Austrian theory demonstrates why free markets and private entrepreneurship are the ways to address these issues. I want to examine interesting questions that will make students and others want to learn more about economics and understand why free markets and liberty are the way to a prospersous society.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
While we need to understand the historical and methodology aspects of the Austrian school we need to build on this work. Young scholars need to apply the Austrian theories to examine new areas of research or expand existing areas. Can we continue to develop Austrian business cycle theory, can we demonstrate that government regulation removes or reduces economic calculation. I think Austrian scholars need to use a variety of means to apply the theories including empirical work and experiments and work to have their research published in mainstream journals.

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David N. Laband received his Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Tech in 1981. He is the author of 8 books and over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His research and teaching interests cover a wide range of topics related to economics and policy, with a focus on natural resources. Of particular interest are linkages between human and natural systems. Dr. Laband has been an occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal and other major North American and Alabama newspapers. He joined the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn University in March 2000, where he is a member of the Center for Forest Sustainability and the Forest Policy Center.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
Travel, racketball, gardening, sporting clays, bird-watching.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
My conviction that voluntary transactions, unfettered by re-distibutionist government intervention, maximizes social welfare.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
As a scientist – James Buchanan
For life generally – John Sophocleus

What kind of insights has the Austrian school brought to your field of ecology and is there a correlation between this economic theory and proper ecological development?
Fundamentally, we care about ecological function as it impacts human well-being. The power and limits of free markets and individual liberty simply must be considered deeply as we assess the causes and consequences of human activity on the environment and, perhaps more importantly, human approaches to tackling environmental issues.

Do you have any new works on the way?
A co-edited volume on Urban-Rural Interfaces

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
To enhance individuals’ appreciation of the wide-ranging impacts of urbanization on both natural and human systems.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Do not be content to preach to the choir – - engage non-believers.

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Randall G. Holcombe is DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Tech, and taught at Texas A&M University and at Auburn University prior to coming to Florida State in 1988. Dr. Holcombe is also Senior Fellow at the James Madison Institute, a Tallahassee-based think tank that specializes in issues facing state governments. He served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors from 2000 to 2006, and is past president of the Public Choice Society and the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. Dr. Holcombe is the author of twelve books and more than 150 articles published in academic and professional journals. His books include The Economic Foundations of Government (1994), Public Policy and the Quality of Life (1995), From Liberty to Democracy: The Transformation of American Government (2002), and Entrepreneurship and Economic Progress (2007). His primary areas of research are public finance and the economic analysis of public policy issues.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
Yes, I have too many hobbies. I have an interest in music, and play guitar, keyboards, and enjoy electronic music. Regrettably, I have more interest than talent! I also enjoy photography. I am a jogger. I get out several times a week to jog, and run in local races. I am also a pilot and airplane owner, with a commercial pilot’s license, instrument and multi-engine ratings, and have accumulated more than 4,000 hours of flight time over the years.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I was drawn to the Austrian school by some classmates I had in graduate school. As an undergraduate major in economics, I never had any classes that had any Austrian content, so it was a revelation to me when some of my classmates who were familiar with the Austrian school pointed me in that direction. As to the second part of the question, the Ludwig von Mises Institute was drawn to me! I was a faculty member in the economics department at Auburn University when the Mises Institute was founded there. It was a wonderful and enthusiastic organization from the beginning, and it was a great experience for me to have been there to see the Institute develop from the very beginning.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
This is a tough question, because I have been inspired by lots of people. One person on that list would be James Buchanan, my dissertation director and one of the founders of the public choice movement. Another person, who would have to be high on the list of anyone who met him, is Murray Rothbard.

How essential is it that the Austrian school discuss entrepreneurship and does your book, Entrepreneurship and Economic Progress, bring any insights that mainstream economists fail to recognize?
Entrepreneurship has always been a key part of the Austrian school, but something that is left out of the neoclassical framework altogether. For the broader profession, I believe economists cannot have a good understanding of the nature of economic progress without making entrepreneurship a fundamental part of their analysis. That’s the main idea I would like to get across to the mainstream. For Austrian economists, who are already aware of the central role played by entrepreneurship, the book shows the way that I would integrate ideas developed by Kirzner, Schumpeter, and others, into a consistent story of economic progress.

Do you have any new works on the way?
Yes, I have several articles in progress, and another book, all of which rest on the foundation of entrepreneurship.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
Ideally, I would like to change the direction of the profession’s thinking. That’s probably wishful thinking on my part, because I don’t think my ideas, by themselves, have had that large an impact. But as a part of a school of thought, when you add my ideas to those of others who are headed in the same direction, together we can have an impact. You can see the increased visibility of the Austrian school over the past few decades. The school’s ideas remain relevant and I am convinced they will have a greater impact in the future, but it’s up to us to see that that happens.

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Robert F. Mulligan is from Westbury, New York, and studied civil engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, receiving a BSCE degree in 1983. He served in the U.S. Air Force and then did his graduate studies at SUNY Binghamton, receiving his Ph.D. in economics in 1993. He was a visiting assistant professor at Clarkson University from 1993-1994. He then completed the Advanced Studies Program at the Kiel Institute of World Economics in Germany, receiving the Advanced Studies Certificate in International Economic Policy Research in 1995. From 1996-1997 he was assistant dean of the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. After that he came to Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where he still teaches. He received tenure there in 2003 and promoted to professor in 2008. His research interests include business cycle analysis, Hayekian spontaneous orders, and fractal analysis of time series. His papers have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Advances in Austrian Economics, the Cato Journal, Constitutional Political Economy, the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Studies in Emergent Order, the Journal of Private Enterprise, Education and Culture, the Indian Journal of Finance, Maritime Economics & Logistics, the World Maritime University Journal of Maritime Affairs, the Journal of Sport Management, Applied Economics Letters, and the Review of Austrian Economics.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
If I’m not at the office working on a paper or some especially dreary academic administrivia, I’m usually at home doing maintenance, reading, or watching a DVD of an old movie. I’m pretty much an all-business kind of a guy in that I don’t have any real hobbies, but I collect old books and Wedgwood jasperware, believe it or not. In terms of book collecting, whether I rate as a bibliophile, a lover of books, literature, and reading, or as a bibliomaniac, a victim of an obsessive-compulsive disorder which revolves around acquiring books, well, it depends on who you ask.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
It’s more that the Austrian school drew me to economics. I read The Theory of Money and Credit and Human Action in high school. Then I studied engineering, but when I finally made it to grad school for economics, for the first two years, though I found the math a breeze, the economic intuition was completely foreign to me. For a lot of mainstream economics, it still is! I reflexively discount everything I learned in grad school—my attitude is generally, that’s probably a fallacy. Sad to say, that usually turns out to be correct. Economists use a lot more math than engineers, even Austrian economists. Ben Powell, whom I met at the American Institute for Economic Research, recommended the Austrian Scholars Conference, and I’ve never missed it since.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
My students. I’ve taught at schools with very rigorous academic environments, and at some with pathetically slack ones, but I’ve always had a critical mass of outstanding students who were absolutely remarkable individuals. I’ve unfortunately had to teach at a couple of institutions where academic standards are quite charitably described as a joke, but I’ve had some great students everywhere I’ve been.

Can you explain how the economic concept of time preference can affect an individual’s religion or vice versa?
This issue arises due to an ongoing controversy in sociobiology, which has an overwhelmingly secular perspective. Religion exists, and in the absence of divine intervention, it must have emerged spontaneously, and therefore must offer survival and reproductive benefits. Some critics of sociobiology define the problem away, like the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who suggested religion is a “spandrel,” a non-functional byproduct of other, actually beneficial adaptations, which are usually unobservable or have an undefined relationship with the purported spandrel. The question is, does religion provide evolutionary advantages, and if not, how could it have emerged as an institution. Divine intervention is not an attractive hypothesis for most modern scientists—it may be true, or not, but either way it doesn’t actually explain anything. To address this question, it occurred to me that for early humans, who enjoyed pathetically short life expectancies, high time preference was appropriate and virtually essential, but anyone with lower time preference would have enjoyed enhanced survival and reproductive opportunities, and furthermore, engaging in longer-range temporal planning helped develop a more powerful brain. Basically, up to the end of the copper stone age, everyone died in infancy, and for the very few who survived to adulthood, old age represented their mid-to-late teens. Once they lost their adult teeth, everybody died of starvation, and in addition, the most trivial injuries were fatal. Religion, especially belief in an afterlife, reincarnation, or spirit survival, lowered practitioners’ time preferences by extending their time horizon, and this effect would be especially dramatic in a very high time-preference environment, where everyone’s burning up lots of energy trying to get enough to eat while simultaneously avoiding predators. You also had to avoid minor injuries like stubbing your toe, because that would usually result in a fatal infection. If anything’s going to make you get religion, everybody dying young all the time would probably do it. Because the belief system lowers time preference, and lower time preference enhances survival and reproductive opportunities, believers flourish, and the belief system is passed on socially, rather than genetically. My own introspection renders this view highly counterintuitive. For me, going to church makes time positively crawl, and saying the rosary is a mechanism for making fifteen minutes seem like four hours. It may be that even in today’s world, where longer life expectancies lower time preference generally, religious rituals still act as a training ground to make us more patient as we mature to adulthood.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I’m working on a new empirical business cycle paper, estimating a Phillips curve capturing the lagged effects of inflation on output and employment. Normally, current inflation raises output and employment, the original Phillips curve result, but after a lag of six-to-eighteen months, inflation lowers output and employment, and by significantly larger amounts. Only Austrian business cycle theory can make any sense out of this result, because it holds that monetary expansion creates an unsustainable, short-term malinvestment boom, but at the expense of lowered sustainable growth in the long run.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work? What drives you to do what you do?
As a member of the Austrian school, and writing in the tradition of Mises and Hayek, I feel uniquely gifted to have access to profound and powerful insights into human behavior and institutions that are completely overlooked by the majority of contemporary economists. The more I hear about the latest fads the more privileged I feel to be an Austrian. Whenever I hear a new term like “the Keynesian resurgence,” I nearly choke with laughter—and it helps a lot to have a sense of humor about the profession. I feel most non-Austrian business cycle theory is either wrong, or irrelevant. One exception is Hyman Minky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis, which is seeing revived interest since the start of the recession, but this post-Keynesian model views markets as inherently unstable and liable to grow endogenously in complexity. Real business cycle theory succeeded in changing the empirical paradigm to focus on predicting the variance in output or employment, rather than actual levels of output or employment, or timing their changes. This was a neat trick, but for any black box that converts inputs into an output signal, if you manipulate the input variances enough, you can get any output signal with any variance you want. Since Austrian economics is typically criticized for being empirically deficient—though this has been changing over the last twenty years or so—it’s interesting that mainstream macro is starting to abandon empirical relevance, or any pretense of it. I’d like someday to be able to look at my research and writing and say I contributed to a better understanding of the causes of the business cycle and the importance of sound money. I’d be especially happy if I contributed to popularizing Austrian business cycle theory among laypeople, that is, among the electorate, because that could really change society for the better.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
I’m going to paraphrase Einstein, and say that political controversies are for today, but scientific truth is forever. My view is that this is correct, scientific truth is forever, in that, even considering historical artifacts like the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, the phlogiston theory of heat, or Newtonian mechanics, which are no longer regarded as “true” or ontologically final, because only their falsification or generalization makes subsequent theoretical advancements possible. Finally, I’m going to quote the Duc de La Rouchefoucald, who said “hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.” This thought always helps me deal with bad referee reports. If this gives any comfort to subsequent generations of researchers, La Rouchefoucald and I could only be delighted.

See Robert Mulligan literature
See Robert Mulligan media

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at andrewcain@mises.com

John Sophocleus has taught economics at Clemson University, Auburn University, and Auburn University Montgomery. He has been twice nominated to the Who’s Who Among American Teachers. He is an adjunct faculty member of the Mises Institute and occasionally lectures there, usually on United States tariff history. Sophocleus generally teaches the principles of microeconomics.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I used to restore and maintain my car collection – but with government mandated car insurance, we no longer drive our nice cars. Teaching is my hobby – if the taxes we face were not so great, I’d do more of it…

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
The lion’s share of the LvMI folks research market economies instead of command and control economies. When I can be around folks who can teach me more about what I’m interested in – there’s a natural attraction.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
As a teacher Jesus Christ; as an economist James M. Buchanan (not to be
confused w/ Pat Buchanan)

How vital is the area of tariffs in the study of economics? What can it tell us and what kind of insights can be gained from it in the study of Austrian economics?
Tariffs are an integral part of US history – the impact of taxes on the course of civilisation in general is Prof. Charles Adams work, which is a must read for any economist in my opinion.

Do you have any new works on the way?
Possibly turning a Writ of Cert. to the US Supreme Court into Quo Waranto.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
Return civil rights (5th Amend) to our nation.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?Have the courage of von Mises to stand up against tyranny (as he did against the National Socialists in Nazi Germany) regardless of the consequences.

See John Sophocleus’ media

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Dr. Prentice served as the Chief Macroeconomist at the U.S. Department of Agricultureunder Presidents Carter and Reagan. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Department of Treasury under President Clinton. PauI earned his B.A. in Mathematics, and his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics, from the University of Connecticut. In addition to teaching Economics, Math, and Science at The Vanguard School in Colorado Springs, Dr. Prentice currently serves as professor of economics at Yorktown University, senior fellow at the Independence Institute, president of the Pikes Peak Economics club, board member of the Limited Government Forum and the Urban League of Peaks Pike Region.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
About 1/2 of my non-working life is spent on liberty-oriented projects or reading liberty-oriented books. Liberty is my main passion and hobby. Other hobbies include sports (mostly watching my boys play baseball), and camping-hiking-fishing in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado (which brings peace to my soul). I also enjoy music and the performing arts.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
I was maleducated in Keynesian macroeconomics in graduate school during the 1970′s. After that, I observed that reality was orthogonal to Keynesian theory. As a trained scientist, I began my own personal search for Economic Truth. Oddly enough, that began when a friend handed me the greatest economics textbook ever written — disguised as a fictional novel — Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It crystalized for me what was happening to the economy during the late 1970′s. That led me to study Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Then, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 led me to study Supply-Side economic theory. Eventually, the logic of markets — what Mises called “praxeology” — drew me to the Austrian School and eventually to the Mises Institute. My journey was helped along the way by numerous friends and colleagues.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
I assume you mean my inspiration as a professional economist? Right now, I am studying economics from a biblical perspective so I would have to say Jesus Christ. There is an incredible book, Jesus: The Unknown Economist, by Charles Gave. It is eerily Austrian in its economic perspective. Of course, any list of great inspirational economists would be incomplete without Milton Friedman, FA Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Fredric Bastiat.

Do you feel that there is hostility against capitalism because of misconceptions? If so, how do Austrians overturn such misconceptions?
The hostility is only partly due to misconceptions, many of which are due to improper or unclear definitions. Austrians can overturn this by clearly defining terms and aruging from a position of intellectual clarity. The other part is not so easy to overturn — it is a deep philosophic difference in the very meaning and purpose of life. What is the Nature of Man? What is the value of the individual vis a vis the collective? What is the proper relationship between the governing and the governed? These questions are part of an eternal battle between liberty and slavery, between good and evil, or if you will, between human and anti-human forces.

Do you have any new works on the way?
I am researching for a book on Biblical Economics. Also, I would like to write an economics textbook for use in mainstream academia, but based on Austrian economic principles. There is so much bad economics out there that it is horrifying.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
Save the world! Actually, contribute in some small way to the understanding that you cannot disconnect political liberty from economic liberty. You cannot have a command-and-control economy and maintain a free society. That is why I left the business world to become a professional educator.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Don’t cede the definitions and assumptions of the Statists. We were born to Liberty — it is our birthright. Whether you believe that comes from our Creator or from our Humanity, it is our birthright. Austrian economc theory concludes that free markets and voluntary exchange create the most peace and prosperity. We do not assume that, we conclude it. This is true economic science, not disguised political opinion as in Keynesian-Marxism. We are not the ideologues, they are. We have proved the world is round. It is simple but not simplistic — we are right, and the Flat-Earthers are wrong. One thing I like about the Mises Institute is the idea that it is our task to keep the light shining in the darkness. You cannot extinguish the dark, but you can illuminate it.

See Paul Prentice’s media

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at Andrewcain@mises.com

Philipp Bagus is professor of economics at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He earned his Bachelor and Master at the University of Münster and his Ph.D. from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos with Jesús Huerta de Soto as his adviser on a thesis on deflation. He is the author of The Tragedy of the Euro – How Political Interests Created a Self-destroying System (forthcoming) and Deep Freeze: Global Credit Markets and the Icelandic Financial Crisis (forthcoming with co-author David Howden). He has published articles mainly on monetary and business cycle theory in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Libertarian Papers, Journal of Libertarian Studies, The Review of Austrian Economics, Procesos de Mercado, Economic Affairs, New Perspectives on Political Economy and the Journal of Business Ethics among others. For more on Philipp Bagus go to www.philippbagus.com

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
In my free time I like to enjoy good company, read, watch movies or go to the opera. As hobbies I play tennis and the piano.

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
In high school I got involved in a German political party, the FDP. From the start I didn´t like the political business too much but was more interested in the theoretical foundations of liberalism. The think tank of the FDP edits some books on classical liberalism. I ordered them and started reading. Rothbard´s Ethics of Liberty opened my eyes. It seemed to say something obvious that no one had had the guts to talk to me about before. I also read Mises Liberalism. The book had an introduction written by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. I was intrigued that the Austrian tradition was still alive and that a German thinker would play an important role in it. Considering how socialist Germany appeared to me, that was indeed a surprise. I found Hoppe´s email address on the internet and just mailed him during my draft. He recommended me to come to Mises University which I did in 2001. That was my first contact with the Institute. It was a fantastic experience and intellectual very stimulating. Gabriel Calzada and Ingolf Krumm recommended me to come to Madrid to study with Huerta de Soto.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
Mises and the tremendous strength that he has shown in the most adverse circumstances. A great transmitter of energy and enthusiasm for me is Jesús Huerta de Soto.

What is the atmosphere like for Austrian scholars in Spain? Are they more accepted?
I think Austrians are more accepted in Spain than for instance in Germany. At least they are stronger at Universities and in the media. At our University Rey Juan Carlos Austrians are a small and respected group. We have our own very well functioning Master program in Austrian economics and collaborate well with the rest of the department. The Juan de Mariana Institute is also a powerful force for Austrian scholarship. Due to large Austrian circles the atmosphere for Austrians in Madrid is fantastic. It is the new Vienna.

Can you tell us more about your new work coming out? What is its focus and message?
I have often been asked, how does the ECB work? We have heard much about the Fed but no one talks about the ECB. In my new book The Tragedy of the Euro I answer this question and analyze the workings of the European monetary system and compare it to the Fed´s. A decisive distinction is that in the European Monetary System several independent governments may use the printing press, i.e. the ECB, in order to finance their deficits. This setup contains explosive incentives. I also explain the broader historical background of the European Union and how and why the Euro was introduced against the vital interests of the German people. The main message is that in its current form the system is self-destructive, it is a tragedy of the commons.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
I would like people to understand the perverse monetary setup of the European Monetary System. I would love to see especially Germans to wake up and to protest against this system that works to their detriment. I would like readers to understand the importance of the liberalization of the monetary system and to realize the self-destructing tendencies of interventionism and, thereby, contribute a little to the restoration of liberty in the field of money.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Ha. Ask me about wisdom in 30 years again. For now let me say that I admire the generation of Austrian scholars that came before my generation and had to find their place as scholars 20 or 30 years ago. They worked in much more adverse circumstances than we do today. My generation has it much easier. It can more easily communicate and relate with fellow Austrians, present papers, go to conferences and publish. The group is much bigger and Mises Institute and other institutions are very supportive. I am very optimistic that the next generation of Austrian scholars will have it even easier. But still, it will be an uphill battle against the establishment and statist interests. So press on and ne cede malis.

See Philipp Bagus’ articles
See Philipp Bagus’ literature

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at Andrewcain@mises.com

Bill Anderson is associate professor of economics at Frostburg State University. He received his doctorate in economics from Auburn University in 1999, his master’s in economics from Clemson University in 1984, and his undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee in 1975. He is graduated from Baylor School of Chattanooga.

While at UT, Bill earned All-American and All-SEC honors in track. He was the 1982 Olive W. Garvey International Economics Essay Contest winner and presented his paper to the Mont Pelerin Society in what was then West Berlin that same year. He has published almost 30 papers in academic journals and has published hundreds of articles in publications such as Reason, Regulation, The Freeman, Forbes Online, and the Free Market. He currently writes a weekly column for The Freeman Online. He has two blogs on Blogspot, including William L. Anderson and Krugman-in-Wonderland.

He recently appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show, “Freedom Watch,” on the Fox Business Channel.

He has four children, three of them adopted from overseas, and two grandchildren. He and his wife, Johanna, are looking to adopt another child this year, a girl from Latvia. He and his family live in Garrett County, Maryland, which receives an average about 100 inches of snow a year.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?
I have a lot of interests. I play the violin and guitar and sing in the Cumberland Choral Society. I read a lot of material, and not just on economics. I also love hiking, mountain biking, road biking, and cross-country skiing. (We get over 100 inches of snow a year where I live.)

What drew you to the Austrian school and to the Ludwig von Mises Institute?
William H. Peterson, who wrote his dissertation under Mises at NYU, was the first person to introduce me to the Austrian School in 1980. I already had an interest in economics, but the Austrian School really opened my eyes. It combined solid analysis with intuition.

Who is your greatest inspiration?
It depends on the area. I’m a Christian, and there are lots of Christian “heroes” in my life and from whom I learn. In the area of economics and social thinking, I really like Mises and Murray Rothbard. In politics, I like Ron Paul because he not only has good intuition, but also has integrity.

Can you give a brief explanation about how mainstream economics are incorrectly viewing outsourcing?
Too many mainstream people are beholden to the old “cost of production” theory of value, so in their view, the higher the cost of production, the greater the amount of wealth is being created. Once one equates high labor costs to wealth, then the analytical game is over because that person is incapable of doing intelligent economic thinking. Outsourcing is nothing more than a furtherance of Division of Labor. Unfortunately, a lot of outsourcing overseas occurs because government policies at home drive out productive people.

What kind of impact do you hope to make with your work?
I have no illusions about what I am doing. Most people are not interested in listening to the Austrians, and especially mainstream economists that hold prestigious professorships. (I do not accept the “Market Test of Economics” view that the present utterings of mainstream professors must be true because the “market” would have discarded the bad stuff and kept the good stuff. If that were true, then Keynesian “economics” would be on the ashheap of history.) Nonetheless, even though I and many other Austrians seem always to be going uphill, I do have hopes of influencing people and I always appreciate hearing from people who have been impacted by what I have written or said regarding Austrian Economics. I do believe Austrian Economics is the best thing going, and I don’t mind being marginalized on that account.

Are there any words of wisdom you wish to pass onto the next generation of Austrian scholars?
Don’t quit what you are doing. Austrian Economics has answers that the mainstream simply cannot produce, and in my view, it is worth it to be an Austrian, even if that means some places won’t hire me.

See William L. Anderson’s articles
See William L. Anderson’s media

If you have any recommendations for Faculty Spotlight, please contact me at Andrewcain@mises.com