I. General Neglect of Bastiat

French laissez faire liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801-December 24, 1850) has suffered over the years from a particularly bad press. Karl Marx called him "the shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics." This portrait may have stemmed from Marx’s resentment towards a political writer whose writing was clear and who gained a large audience in his lifetime. There is no body of literature asking What Bastiat Really Meant, whereas a cottage industry arose in the case of Marx. And of course Bastiat was a great enemy and trenchant critic of socialism.

Bastiat has been dismissed by those who might have been expected to be friendlier towards him. Thus Joseph Schumpeter wrote: "I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist. I hold that he was no theorist." English-speaking economists generally have regarded Bastiat as a "mere popularizer" of the ideas of the great Adam Smith.

This article was first published in Vol. 19, Number 7 of The Free Market.

In 1957, a businessman and radio personality named Robert LeFevre (1911-1986) founded a very special institution in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In his private studies, he had discovered the libertarian intellectual tradition. He noted the dire need for an institution that would educate people from all walks of life in the philosophy of freedom. He took it upon himself and named it the Freedom School, later changing the name to Rampart College before it shut down in 1968. Afterward, he carried on his work in South Carolina under the patronage of business giant Roger Milliken.

The Freedom School in Colorado was one of the most important institutions for teaching free-market economics in its day. Among its rotating faculty were Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, F.A. Harper, Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read, Gordon Tullock, G. Warren Nutter, Bruno Leoni, James J. Martin, and even Ludwig von Mises. Among its graduates were Roy Childs, Fred and Charles Koch, Roger MacBride, and many other intellectual activists still working today.

This article was first published in Vol. 21, Number 5 of The Free Market.

Lecturing at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950, F.A. Hayek was nicely positioned to counter the rising influence of J.M. Keynes. Keynes's new vision of macroeconomics was a resurrection of old fallacies but with a modern twist: an open call for a consolidated state to manage investment. More than anyone else, and under the pretense of explaining the economic crisis of the time, Keynes gave intellectual credence to the rise of managerial states in America, the UK, and Europe during the '30s and the war. 

Hayek countered with a defense of laissez-faire beefed up by the insights of the Austrian School of economics. He had worked with Ludwig von Mises in Vienna after the period in which Mises first laid out his business cycle theory. The danger of central banks, wrote Mises, is that they exercise power of interest rates, and can thereby distort the production structure of an economy. They can create artificial booms, which either lead to hyperinflation or economic bust. 

"A Primer on Mises"
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

When Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises died in New York City in 1973 at the age of 92, there was no front-page obituary in the New York Times. But believers in liberty knew that a giant had fallen. 

Mises was born in 1881 in the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg, the son of a successful engineer. At the age of 19, he entered the University of Vienna, and received his doctorate at 27.

In the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of the University of Vienna, the young Mises studied in the tradition of the founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger. Mises also attended the seminar of the other giant of the School, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Along with teaching, Böhm-Bawerk was finance minister of Austria-Hungary, and he put the School's ideas into practice by balancing the budget and establishing a gold standard. 

After receiving his PhD, Mises set to work on The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), his first major work. The earlier Austrians had followed the classical school in separating money from the rest of the economy, analyzing it in separate theoretical terms. Mises argued that just as the price of any commodity is determined by supply and demand, so is the purchasing power of money, its "price."

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. During 45 years of research and writing, in 25 books and thousands of articles, he battled every destructive trend in this century -- socialism, statism, relativism, and scientism -- and awakened a passion for freedom in thousands of scholars, journalists, and activists. 

Teaching in New York, Las Vegas, Auburn, and at conferences around the world, Rothbard led the renaissance of the Austrian School of economics. He galvanized an academic and popular fight for liberty and property, against the omnipotent state and its court intellectuals. 

Volumes one and two of his magisterial history of economic thought appeared just after his death, published by Edward Elgar. Whereas other texts pretend to an uninterrupted march toward higher levels of truth, Rothbard illuminated a history of unknown geniuses and lost knowledge, of respected charlatans and honored fallacies. A large collection of Rothbard's best scholarly articles appears later this year in the publisher's "Economists of the Century" series. In addition, there are unpublished manuscripts, articles, and letters to fill many more volumes. 

Mental ability declines with age.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) is not widely regarded as a major figure of twentieth-century economic