Hillsdale College Austrian Economics

Richard Ebeling on Austrian Economics, Economic Freedom and the Trends of the Future

Introduction: Dr. Richard Ebeling is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. He has been a visiting professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (2008-2009), served as the president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008 and was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College, in Michigan (1988-2003). Dr. Ebeling is the author of Political Economy, Public Policy, and Monetary Economics: Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian Tradition (Routledge, 2010), Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom (Elgar, 2003) and is also the editor of the Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises (Liberty Fund), based on the "lost papers" of Ludwig von Mises, which he recovered from a formerly secret KGB archive in Moscow, Russia. The last of this three-volume set was published in April 2012. Dr. Ebeling is also the co-author and co-editor of the multi-volume work, In Defense of Capitalism (Northwood University, 2010-2013). In the early 1990s, Ebeling consulted on market reform and privatization with the emerging new democratic government in Lithuania when it was still part of the Soviet Union and witnessed the violent, attempted Soviet crackdown on the Lithuanian freedom movement in January 1991. He also was with Russian defenders of freedom in Moscow during the failed hardline coup in August 1991. Dr. Ebeling earned his Ph.D. in economics from Middlesex University in London, England.
Daily Bell: Tell us about the fourth volume of In Defense of Capitalism and the upcoming fifth volume. Your articles are a large part of the collection. Give us some background on what they address.
Richard Ebeling: I am a professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. The university is an institution of higher learning devoted to offering a higher quality education in the various areas of business. But underpinning Northwood is a dedication to an explicit philosophy of individual freedom, free markets and constitutionally limited government. As part of sharing with a wider audience these ideas of liberty, for the last four years I have collaborated with the president of the university, Dr. Keith Pretty, and vice-president, Timothy Nash, in preparing and editing an annual collection of essays with the general title, In Defense of Capitalism. I have written about 25-30 percent of the essays in each volume. In the last, volume 4, which was published in August 2013, my contributions focused on the principles and history of liberty, and the dangers from modern collectivist trends. I also challenged the assumption that America needs a central bank for a sound monetary system and warned of the consequences from price inflation in undermining the social and economic order. Volume 5 of In Defense of Capitalism should be published in August 2014, and some of my contributions will be on ObamaCare, monetary mismanagement by the Federal Reserve and the means and methods for restoring...