He earned his Ph.D. (Philosophy, 1974) and his Habilitation (Foundations of Sociology and Economics, 1981), both from the Goethe-Universität. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1976 to 1978. In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States, to study under Murray Rothbard. He remained a close associate until Rothbard’s death in January 1995. Hoppe was Professor of Economics at University of Nevada, Las Vegas until retirement in 2008.

He gave a series of speeches at conferences that were organized by Lew Rockwell, Burt Blumert, and Murray Rothbard for the purpose of creating what came to be known as paleo-libertarianism.

Hoppe is a Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and, until December, 2004, the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. The author of several widely-discussed books and articles, he has put forth an “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights, based in part on the discourse ethics theories of German philosophers Jürgen Habermas (Hoppe’s PhD advisor) and Karl-Otto Apel. In 2005, he founded the Property and Freedom Society. (CC Wikipedia 04/01/2010)

After receiving his doctoral degree, Boettke taught at several schools, including Oakland University, Manhattan College, and New York University. In 1998, he returned to George Mason University as a faculty member. In 2004, he was named a Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics. He has also been a Faculty Fellow at the Charles University/Georgetown University American Institute for Political and Economic Studies in Prague and a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Boettke is Deputy Director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University where he is a professor of economics. He is also senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. Until 2007, Boettke held the position of Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D. program in economics at George Mason. He is also editor-in-chief of the Review of Austrian Economics. He is also head coach of the boys Freshman basketball team at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Virginia.

He lives in Fairfax, Virginia with his wife Rosemary and their two sons, Matthew and Stephen.  (CC Wikipedia 03/31/2010)

Murray Newton Rothbard (1926 – 1995) was an American intellectual, individualist anarchist, author, and economist of the Austrian School who helped define modern libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed “anarcho-capitalism“. Rothbard wrote over twenty books.

Building on the Austrian School’s concept of spontaneous order in markets, support for a free market in money production and condemnation of central planning, Rothbard sought to minimize coercive government control of the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term wellbeing of the populace, labeling the State as nothing but a “gang of thieves writ large” – the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.

Rothbard concluded that virtually all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He viewed many regulations and laws ostensibly promulgated for the “public interest” as self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats engaging in dangerously unfettered self-aggrandizement, as they were not subject to market disciplines which would quickly eliminate such parasitic inefficiencies if they were to occur in the competitive private sector.

Rothbard was equally condemning of state corporatism. He criticized many instances where business elites co-opted government’s monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals.

He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and “a compulsory monopoly of force” prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. He also considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics. Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.

Born in Moravia, Schumpeter was a brilliant student. He began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under the Austrian capital theorist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, taking his PhD in 1906. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz. In 1911 he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I. In 1919-1920, he served as the Austrian Minister of Finance, with some success, and in 1920-1924, as President of the private Biedermann Bank. That bank, as great part of that regional economy, collapsed in 1924 leaving Schumpeter bankrupt.

From 1925-1932, he held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. With the rise of Nazism in central Europe, he moved to the United States and lectured at Harvard in 1927-1928 and 1930. He would teach there from 1932 until his death in 1950. During his Harvard years he was not generally considered a good classroom teacher, but he acquired a school of loyal followers. His prestige among colleagues was likewise not very high because his views seemed outdated and not in synch with the then-fashionable Keynesianism. This period of his life was characterized by hard work but little recognition of his core ideas.

Although Schumpeter encouraged some young mathematical economists and was even the president of the Econometric Society (1940-41), Schumpeter was not a mathematician but rather an economist and tried instead to integrate sociological understanding into his economic theories. From current thought it has been argued that Schumpeter’s ideas on business cycles and economic development could not be captured in the mathematics of his day – they need the language of non-linear dynamical systems to be partially formalized.

Born in Vienna the son of a high official in the war ministry, he first trained in sociology and law. He was the brother-in-law of another prominent Austrian school economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Wieser held posts at the universities of Vienna and Prague until succeeding Austrian-school founder Carl Menger in Vienna in 1903 where with Böhm-Bawerk he shaped the next generation of Austrian economists including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter in the late 1890s and early 1900s. He became Austrian finance minister in 1917.

Wieser is renowned for two main works, Natural Value (1889), which carefully details the alternative-cost doctrine and the theory of imputation, and his Social Economics (1914), which is an ambitious attempt to apply it to the real world.

The economic calculation debate started with his notion of the paramount importance of accurate calculation to economic efficiency. Prices to him represented, above all, information about market conditions, and are thus necessary for any sort of economic activity. A socialist economy, therefore, would require a price system in order to operate.

He also stressed the importance of the entrepreneur to economic change, which he saw as being brought about by “the heroic intervention of individual men who appear as leaders toward new economic shores.” This idea of leadership was later taken up by Joseph Schumpeter in his treatment of economic innovation.

Unlike almost all Austrian School economists he rejected classical liberalism, writing that “freedom has to be superseded by a system of order.”

After completing his studies he entered the Austrian ministry of finance, spent the 1880s at the University of Innsbruck (1881-1889), time during he published the first two (out of three) volumes of his magnum opus, Capital and Interest.

In 1889 he was called to Vienna by the finance ministry to draft a proposal for direct-tax reform. Böhm-Bawerk’s proposal called for a modern income tax, which was soon approved and met with a great deal of success in the next few years.

He then became Austrian Minister of Finance in 1895. He was to serve briefly and again on another occasion, although a third time he remained in the post from 1900-1904. As Finance Minister he fought continuously for strict maintenance of the legally fixed gold standard and a balanced budget. In 1902 he eliminated the sugar subsidy, which had been a feature of the Austrian economy for nearly two centuries. He finally resigned in 1904, when the increased fiscal demands of the army threatened to unbalance the budget. Joseph Schumpeter praised Böhm-Bawerk’s efforts toward “the financial stability of the country.” His image was on the one-hundred schilling banknote between 1984 and 2002, when the euro was introduced.

He wrote extensive critiques of Karl Marx’s economics in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists attended his seminar in 1905-06. He returned to teaching in 1904, with a chair at the University of Vienna. He taught many students including Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Henryk Grossman. (CC Wikipedia)

Carl Menger (February 28, 1840 – February 26, 1921) was the founder of the Austrian School of economics, famous for contributing to the development of the theory of marginal utility that refuted the cost-of-production theories of value developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

In 1867 Menger began a study of political economy which culminated in 1871 with the publication of his Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre), thus becoming the father of the Austrian School of economic thought. It was in this work that he challenged classical cost-based theories of value with his theory of marginality.

Ensconced in his professorship he set about refining and defending the positions he took and methods he utilized in Principles, the result of which was the 1883 publication of Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Oekonomie insbesondere). The book caused a firestorm of debate, during which members of the Historical School of Economics began to derisively call Menger and his students the “Austrian School” to emphasize their departure from mainstream economic thought in Germany. In 1884 Menger responded with the pamphlet The Errors of Historicism in German Economics and launched the infamous Methodenstreit, or methodological debate, between the Historical School and the Austrian School. During this time Menger began to attract like-minded disciples who would go on to make their own mark on the field of economics, most notably Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser. (CC Wikipedia)

The Austrian School (also known as the Vienna School or the Psychological School) is a school of economic thought that emphasizes the spontaneous organizing power of the price mechanism. Austrians hold that the complexity of subjective human choices makes mathematical modelling of the evolving market extremely difficult (or undecidable) and advocate a laissez faire approach to the economy. Austrian School economists advocate the strict enforcement of voluntary contractual agreements between economic agents, and hold that commercial transactions should be subject to the smallest possible imposition of forces they consider to be coercive (in particular the smallest possible amount of government intervention).

The Austrian School derives its name from its predominantly Austrian founders and early supporters, including Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Ludwig von Mises. Other prominent Austrian School economists of the 20th century include Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek. (CC Wikipedia)

Catallaxy is influenced by Ludwig von Mises’s term Catallactics and was first used by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. He was unhappy with the usage of the term Economy, feeling that the Greek root of the word, which could be translated as ‘household management’, implied that economic agents in a market economy possessed shared goals. Economy is used by Aristotle as ‘the art of household management’ and part of the virtue of wisdom. Keeping in mind that the ‘household’ at Aristotle is used in a broader sense either for a private household or for the household of a state and even if the household at the times of Aristotle could have been a large business unit containing family and thousands of slaves, it was lead towards shared goals which differs from what a market economy is about. Catallaxy as a ‘Science of Exchange’ describes according to Hayek: “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market”. (CC Wikipedia)