Note: Libertarian Girl is off to Europe, but while she’s away she’ll be updating with previously written posts about politics and life in the places she’s visiting. She’ll soon be back to her regularly scheduled Libertarian Girl programming.
Today, I head from two extremes: venturing from the very Eastern-European Bratislava, Slovakia into Vienna, Austria, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire and a former imperial city. Austria is a very socialist country, as Arnold Schwarzenegger let us know.
What’s interesting, then, is that Austria lends its name to one of the most free market-oriented strains of economic thought, the Austrian School of Economics. Wikipedia’s article on the Austrian School is virtually incomprehensible, but what it boils down to is this: as little intervention in “the invisible hand” of the market as possible. I had the delight of listening to Austrian-school economist Bettina Greaves speak at UNC-Chapel Hill last year, and she boiled it down in simple terms: from the time the first caveman made something that another person could use and they bartered services, the market has worked and has also been thwarted from working through government intervention, as it is today.
Two of the most famous Austrian economists are Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (who was Bettina Greaves’ mentor). Hayek was a Nobel Prize-winning professor at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago and is one of the key economists able to influence a return to more liberal (liberal as in free) economic policies in the latter half of the 20th century. He was a thorn in the side of John Maynard Keynes, and their debates were legendary and still continue today among their followers.
Of course, there’s still plenty of government intervention and we certainly don’t have a classically liberal economic system at the moment, but what we do have is an improvement from Keynesian policies.
Hayek was a student of Ludwig von Mises at the University of Vienna and during that time, Hayek began to turn away from the socialism he had previously espoused to favor a more libertarian style of economic freedom with little government intervention. It was a good development for not just libertarianism, but for the world, and it is a lesson that Austria has yet to learn.
So today, Libertarian Girl ventures to the land of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
Auf wiedersehn.
Hayek was not a student of Mises, he was student of Wieser. In his autobiography he said that was oly one at Mises course, ant it seems to him boring. Later, after he gratuated meet Mises, when he work at statistical institute.
Me
September 5th, 2008
You may want to change Hayek’s Wikipedia article if you have verifiable sources stating otherwise, since it says that Hayek attended Mises’ private seminars.
Hayek certainly didn’t find Mises’ ideas boring even if he didn’t like his teaching style.
libertariangirl
September 29th, 2008