From the Publisher
In this revelatory book, based on original research and interviews with more than 100 key sources, Brian Doherty traces the evolution of the movement through the unconventional life stories of its most influential leaders-Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman-and through the personal battles, character flaws, love affairs, and historical events that altered its course. And by doing so, he provides a fascinating new perspective on American history-from the New Deal through the culture wars of the 1960s to today's most divisive political issues. Neither an exposé nor a political polemic, this entertaining historical narrative will enlighten anyone interested in American politics.
Author Biography: Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers, and books, including the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, and The Weekly Standard. He is also the author of This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground. He lives in Los Angeles.
Fortune Magazine has an excellent review on this book:
http://money.cnn.tv/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/03/19/8402359/index.htm
Excertps
What free markets prices do, in the Austrian theory, is spread information about every person's subjective valuations of needs and desires for goods; and they do so by depending, as Hayek has emphasized, on local, individual knowledge of specific circumstances that no central planner could ever gather trough any means other than the very system of free market prices that planners think they can replace.
Mises begins where he insists economics must begin: with acting man, facing an uncertain future and necessarily scarce means, with a shifting set of values and choices, striving, though not necessarily succeeding, to further his own perceived well-being.
Hayek lost the battle with Keynes but in some ways won the war (...) Hayek's economic writings...are almost unknown to the modern student; it is hardly remembered that there was a time when the new theories of Hayek were the principal rival of the new theories of Keynes.
She (Ayn Rand) maintained (...) that principles and conceptual thinking were more important than concretes (...) that collectivism as a principle is the enemy of the human mind and spirit.
The Anthem world is so collectivized that people can't make their own decisions about what to study, what job to perform, or who to love; they can't even conceptualize the first person pronoun.
While Rand has many virulent critics, none gainsay her writing's ability to change minds and lives.
"What organization of our side has defined a concrete ideology of Americanism?" Rand wrote to Pollock:
None. The firs aim of our organization will be intellectual and philosophical - not merely political and economic. We will give people a faith - a positive, clear and consitent system of belief (...) We want to teach people, not what the system of private enterprise is, but why we should believe in it and fight for it. We want to provide a spiritual, ethical, philosophical groundwork for the belief in the system of private enterprise.
Ayn Rand on Howard Roark: A resolute individualist, he does not need or desire the world's acclaim; he is the only judge that matters.
Under the surface, Rand seems to argue in The Fountainhead that what happens to the world at large is insignificant compared to the wonders that creative individuals ike Roark - the fountainheads of all human progress - can achieve.
On the Fountainhead: "Capitalist democracy has no ideology. That is what this book has to give it."
Ayne Rand: the "essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain."
Hazlitt: Taxing and spending is analogous to that broken window; you might see what government does with the money, but you don't see what the money's original holder would have done with it if the government hadn't taken it. (...) seeing trough the veils of good intentions and grandiose plans of state economic intervention.
Rose Wilder Lane's insistance on the libertarian qualities of high Muslim civilization in the Middle Ages.
(...) a radical political movement made up of eccentrics with extraordinary self-confidence in their own intellectual judgments.
The human mind, Hayek posits, is an essentially interpretive and classifying organism; pure perception not filtered through mental categories doesn't exist.
To Hayek, the rules we follow, knowingly or not, shape us and our minds far more than we consciously shape our rules.
Only the wealthy, Hayek argues with some historical evidence, can afford to subsidize the new and radical in any field.
Rothbard's Man, Economy and State: (...) men act to improve their ciscumstances, using scarce resources and swimming in uncertainty.
On fractional reserve banking: Rothbard considered the practice inherently fraudulent and maintained that it should be illegal in any libertarian society, since it involves promises to replay money deposited tha can never be all honored.
Rothbard:
(...) the greatest revelation of praxeological economics is the hidden order of free markets and the foreseeable chaos of intervention.
(...) any study of economics in the real world inevitably involves the study of the exchange of property, and thus it requires an underlying ethic that says what property is.
Friedman explains how markets permit unanimity without conforrmity.
Politicians, as Leonard Read always argues, are lagging indicators, not leading ones.
Kirzner outlined modern Austrianism's differences with the neoclassical mainstream(...):
Modern mainstream economics displays a number of related features which, for Austrians, appear as serious flaws. These features include especially: a) an excessive preoccupation with the state of equilibrium; b) an unfortunate perspective on the nature and role of competition in markets; c) grssoly insufficient attention to the role (and subjective character) of knowledge expectations, and learning in market procesees; and d) a normative approach heavily dependent on questionable aggregation concepts and thus insensitive to the idea of plan coordination among market participants.
The Austrian rejection of neoclassical-type models, which attempt to emulate the mehtods of the physical sciences, can be traced to Mises. Econnomics is concerned with human behavior, Mises insisted, which is not predictable and modelable in the way the physical world is.
Mises and his fellows have always seen economics as a science of process and change (...).
The Austrians don't have much use for aggregative measures.(...) the neoclassical perfect competition model that assumes everyone knows everything they need to know and that everyone is a price taker, not a price maker, makes everything that actually comprises real competition in a real market seem like imperfections that need fixing, often by government action.
The stagflation of the 1970s showed that there was not long-term value in inflating to cut unemployment.
In 1987, Objectivist libertarian Alan Greenspan achieved the highest position of power and influence that any movement libertarian ever had - chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board.
Nozick argued that in a world of private property, even if you don't own any yourself, you are still apt to be better off than in a world without it.
Hayek agreed with Hume and Locke that property, along with the rules defining it and how it could be legitimately transferred, is the base of civilization.
