The Future of Freedom Foundation, in conjunction with the students in the George Mason University Economics Society, is pleased to present our Economic Liberty Lecture Series. Every month, FFF provides a lecture on the principles of economic liberty to the students of George Mason University and the general public. For a schedule of future events, please see our upcoming events.
Scroll down or click on a lecture title below to watch a specific lecture.
Claudia R. Williamson: “The Trouble with Aid” – Monday, February 20, 2012
Charles K. Rowley: “Liberty and the State: A Virginia Political Economy Perspective” – Wednesday, November 2, 2011
David Friedman: “Market Failure: An Argument Both For and Against Government” – Wednesday, October 5, 2011
James Bovard: “Obama’s War on Prosperity and Freedom” – Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Lawrence H. White: “The Threat to Sound Money and the Free Banking Solution” – Monday, April 4, 2011
Tom G. Palmer: “Democratic Liberalism, Limited Government, Free Markets: Necessary Partners?” – Monday, March 7, 2011
David E. Berstein: “Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform” – Monday, February 7, 2011
Jeffrey A. Miron: “Obamanomics: Growing the Pie or Dividing the Pie?” – Monday, November 15, 2010
Donald J. Boudreaux: “Liberty, Legislation, and Law” – Monday, October 4, 2010
Bryan Caplan: “Immigration Restrictions: A Solution in Search of a Problem” – Monday, September 13, 2010
Richard M. Ebeling: “The New Road to Serfdom and the Continuing Relevance of Austrian Economics” – Monday, April 6, 2010
Sheldon Richman: “Capitalism versus the Free Market” – Monday, March 1, 2010
Steven Horwitz: “Do We Really Need a Central Bank?” – Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Lawrence W. Reed: “Lessons from the Great Depression” – Monday, November 2, 2009
Robert Higgs: “The Great Depression and the Current Recession” – Monday, October 5, 2009
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.: “Economics and Moral Courage” – Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Bruce Fein: “A Safer, Freer, and Wealthier America” – Monday, April 6, 2009
Thomas J. DiLorenzo: “The Founding Father of Economic Statism” – Monday, February 2, 2009
James Bovard: “Bailout Bosh and Other Economic Frauds of Our Times” – Thursday, November 13, 2008
Peter J. Boettke: “Austrian Economics and the Present Crisis” – Monday, October 6, 2008
Claudia R. Williamson
Monday, February 20, 2012
Claudia R. Williamson is a post-doctoral fellow at the Development Research Institute of New York University. Her research focuses on applied microeconomics, the political economy of development, and the effectiveness of development policies, such as foreign aid.
Claudia R. Williamson “The Trouble with Aid” from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.
Charles K. Rowley
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Charles K. Rowley “Liberty and the State: A Virginia Political Economy Perspective” from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.
David FriedmanWednesday, October 5, 2011
Economic Liberty Lecture Series: David Friedman from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.
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James Bovard
“Obama’s War on Prosperity and Freedom”
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Economic Liberty Lecture Series: James Bovard from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.
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Lawrence H. White
“The Threat to Sound Money and the Free Banking Solution”
Monday, April 4, 2011
Lawrence H. White is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Prior to position at George Mason, he was the F. A. Hayek Professor of Economic History in the Department of Economics, University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has been a visiting professor at the Queen’s School of Management and Economics, Queen’s University of Belfast, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
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Tom G. Palmer
“Democratic Liberalism, Limited Government, Free Markets: Necessary Partners?”
Monday, March 7, 2011
Tom Palmer is Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, General Director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and Director of Cato University.
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David E. Bernstein
“Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform”
Monday, February 7, 2011
David E. Bernstein is Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, where he has been teaching since 1995. He was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center for Spring 2003 semester, at the University of Michigan School of Law for the 2005-06 academic year, and at Brooklyn Law School in Fall 2006.
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Jeffrey A. Miron
“Obamanomics: Growing the Pie or Dividing the Pie?”
Monday, November 4, 2010
Jeffrey A. Miron is Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. Miron has previously served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and Boston University; at the latter, he was Department chairman for six years. He has been the recipient of an Olin Fellowship from the National Bureau of Economic Research, an Earhart Foundation Fellowship, and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. Miron holds a B.A. in economics, magna cum laude, from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.
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Donald J. Boudreaux
“Liberty, Legislation, and Law”
Monday, October 4, 2010
Professor Donald J. Boudreaux was the Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, from August 2001 to August 2009. Previously, he was president of the Foundation for Economic Education (1997-2001); Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Economics at Clemson University (1992-1997); and Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University (1985-1989).
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Bryan Caplan
“Immigration Restrictions: A Solution in Search of a Problem”
Monday, September 13, 2010
Bryan Caplan, is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, Social Science Quarterly, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other outlets.
Bryan Caplan is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. His current project is a new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.
His webpage, http://www.bcaplan.com, features both his academic research and his numerous other interests, including the online Museum of Communism.
Bryan Caplan blogs on EconLog along with Arnold Kling and David Henderson.
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Richard M. Ebeling
“The New Road to Serfdom and the Continuing Relevance of Austrian Economics”
Monday, April 6, 2010
Richard M. Ebeling, former Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan and former President of the Foundation for Economic Education, is professor of economics at Northwood University.
Richard discovered the freedom philosophy as a teenager while attending Hollywood High in Los Angeles, when he came across The Freeman and the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He earned a B.A. in economics at California State University, Sacramento, an M.A. at Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. at Middlesex University in London, England.
A passionate advocate of free markets and constitutionally limited government, Richard has written, edited, and contributed to over 30 books and has published numerous articles. He lectures extensively in the United States and around the world and is a popular guest on radio and television talk shows.
He has not only written and lectured about the cause of liberty, he has also lived it. In 1991, while consulting on market reform and privatization in the former Soviet Union, he joined the defenders of freedom and faced the Soviet tanks in Vilnius, Lithuania, and again in Moscow, Russia, during the attempted hard-line communist insurrection.
In 1996 he discovered the “lost papers” of Ludwig von Mises in a formerly secret KGB archive in Moscow and brought to America copies of virtually the entire collection of 10,000 pages. He is currently completing the editorial work of the papers, Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, published by Liberty Fund.
He and his wife, Anna, live in Midland, Michigan, with their chocolate Labrador, Ludwig von Mises IV. They have a daughter, two granddaughters and a grandson who reside in Pasadena, California.
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Sheldon Richman
“Capitalism versus the Free Market”
Monday, March 1, 2010
Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, published by The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York, and serves as senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is the author of FFF’s award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families; Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax; and Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State.
Calling for the abolition, not the reform, of public schooling. Separating School & State has become a landmark book in both libertarian and educational circles. In his column in the Financial Times, Michael Prowse wrote: “I recommend a subversive tract, Separating School & State by Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank… . I also think that Mr. Richman is right to fear that state education undermines personal responsibility…”
Mr. Richman’s articles on population, federal disaster assistance, international trade, education, the environment, American history, foreign policy, privacy, computers, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The Freeman, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics.
A former newspaper reporter and former senior editor at the Cato Institute, Mr. Richman is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia.
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Steven Horwitz
“Do We Really Need a Central Bank?”
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. He is the author of two books, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective (Routledge, 2000) and Monetary Evolution, Free Banking, and Economic Order (Westview, 1992), and he has written extensively on Austrian economics, Hayekian political economy, monetary theory and history, and the economics and social theory of gender and the family.
His work has been published in professional journals such as History of Political Economy, Southern Economic Journal, and The Cambridge Journal of Economics. He has also done public policy research for the Mercatus Center, Heartland Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Cato Institute. His current project is a book tentatively titled Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of the Modern Family. Horwitz currently serves as the book review editor of The Review of Austrian Economics and as an academic advisor for the Heartland Institute and a contributing editor to Critical Review and Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines. A member of the Mont Pelerin Society, he completed his MA and PhD in economics at George Mason University and received his A.B. in economics and philosophy from The University of Michigan.
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Lawrence W. Reed
“Lessons from the Great Depression”
Monday, November 2, 2009
Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education, headquartered in Irvington, New York.
After serving as President of the Mackinac Center for its first two decades, Reed became president emeritus of the Center upon assuming his duties as president of FEE.
Reed holds a B.A. degree in Economics from Grove City College (1975) and an M.A. degree in History from Slippery Rock State University (1978), both in Pennsylvania. He taught economics at Midland’s
Northwood University from 1977 to 1984 and chaired the Department of Economics from 1982 to 1984. He designed the university’s unique dual major in Economics and Business Management and founded its annual, highly-acclaimed Freedom Seminar. In 1982, he was a major party candidate in the general election for the U. S. House of Representatives from Michigan’s 4th district. He moved to Boise, Idaho in 1984 to direct a policy institute there before moving back to Michigan to head up the Mackinac Center in December 1987.
Under his leadership, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy emerged as the largest and one of the most effective and prolific of over 40 state-based free market think tanks in America. He served a term as president and 15 years as a member of the board of directors of the State Policy Network, a national organization whose membership consists of those state-based groups.
In 1994, Reed was invited to give the Commencement address to the graduating class of the Colleges of Education, Health, and Human Services and Extended Learning at Central Michigan University (CMU) before an audience of 6,000. CMU conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Public Administration. In 1998, Grove City College (his undergraduate alma mater) bestowed upon him its Distinguished Alumni Award.
In the past twenty years, he has authored over 1,000 newspaper columns and articles, 200 radio commentaries, dozens of articles in magazines and journals in the U. S. and abroad, as well as five books. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, among many others. Reed’s most recent book is Striking the Root: Essays on Liberty. Since 1978, he has delivered more than 1,000 speeches in 40 states and 15 foreign countries, including one at People’s University in Beijing, China.
Reed’s interests in political and economic affairs have taken him as a freelance journalist to 69 countries on six continents since 1985, including five visits to Russia, five to China, four to Nicaragua, three to Poland, five to Kenya, and others to such places as Cambodia, East Germany, Mozambique, Haiti, Japan, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Greece, Italy, Australia, Slovenia, Croatia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Singapore, Israel, Egypt, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iceland and New Zealand.
From firsthand experience, he has reported on hyperinflation in South America, voodoo in Haiti, black markets behind the Iron Curtain, reforms and repression in China and Cambodia, the recent stunning developments in Eastern Europe, and civil war inside Nicaragua and Mozambique. Among many foreign adventures, Reed visited the ravaged nation of Cambodia in 1989 with his late friend, Academy Award winner Dr. Haing S. Ngor; recorded an authentic native voodoo ceremony in a remote region of Haiti in 1987; traveled with the Polish anti-communist underground for which he was arrested and detained by
border police in 1986; interviewed presidents and cabinet officials in half a dozen nations; spent time with the contra rebels during the Nicaraguan civil war; and lived for two weeks with the rebels of Mozambique at their bush headquarters in 1991, at the height of that country’s devastating civil war.
Reed was first elected in 1994 to the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington, New York – one of the oldest and most respected economics institutes in America and publisher of the journal, The Freeman, for which he writes a column entitled Ideas and Consequences. In 1998, he was elected chairman of FEE’s board of Trustees and reelected chairman in 1999 and 2000.
His spare-time interests include reading, travel, flyfishing, hiking, skydiving, and animals of just about any kind.
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Robert Higgs
“The Great Depression and the Current Recession: Similarities and Differences”
Monday, October 5, 2009
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Johns
Hopkins University, and he has been a member of the faculty at the University of Washington (1968-83), Lafayette College (1983-89), and Seattle University (1989-94) and a visiting professor at the University of Economics in Prague (2006). He has also presented a series of lectures and has supervised and examined doctoral candidates in economics at Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala. He was a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1971-72), and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University (1973-74).
Higgs is the author of eight books, the most recent of which are Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (2006) and Neither Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government (2007). Of his five edited or co-edited books, the most recent are Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy (with Carl Close, 2005) and The Challenge of Liberty: Classical Liberalism Today (with Carl Close, 2006). A contributor to many scholarly volumes, he is also the author of more than 100 articles and reviews in the professional journals of economics, demography, history, and public policy.
His popular articles have appeared in many leading newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Financial Times; in many magazines, including Reason, The Freeman, and Liberty; and at many Web sites. He has appeared on many network radio and television programs, including NPR, NBC, ABC, C-SPAN, PBS, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, and on scores of local radio and television programs, and he has been interviewed for articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al-Ahram Weekly, Investor’s Business Daily, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, Folha de São Paulo, Christian Science Monitor, and many other news media.
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Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
“Economics and Moral Courage”
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. is founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., and vice president of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, Cal.
He is the editor of six books, including The Irrepressible Rothbard., and author of thousands of articles appearing in journals, magazines, newspapers, as well as a commentator for radio and television. He is editor of the famed daily newsite, Lewrockwell.com.
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Bruce Fein
“A Safer, Freer, and Wealthier America”
Monday, April 6, 2009
Bruce Fein commands impressive experience and influence in the corridors of both national and international power. He graduated from Harvard Law School with honors in 1972. After a coveted federal judicial clerkship, he joined the U.S. Department of Justice where he served as assistant director of the Office of Legal Policy, legal adviser to the assistant attorney general for antitrust, and the associate deputy attorney general. Mr. Fein then was appointed general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, followed by an appointment as research director for the Joint Congressional Committee on Covert Arms Sales to Iran. He recently served on the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Presidential signing statements.
He is frequently quoted in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and other major national publications. He has been featured on the cover of the American Bar Association Journal, the legal profession’s most prestigious publication.
He has authored several volumes on the United States Supreme Court, the United States Constitution, and international law. He has assisted three dozen countries in constitutional revision, including Russia, Spain, South Africa, Iraq, Cyprus, and Mozambique, and consulted foreign nations on matters ranging from telecommunications and cable regulation to sugar quotas, oil and gas pipelines, immigration, election laws, and human rights.
Mr. Fein has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Brookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has also been executive editor of World Intelligence Review, a periodical devoted to national security and intelligence issues. He regularly lectures to foreign guests and dignitaries visiting the United States on behalf of the State Department.
At present, he writes regular columns for the Washington Times and Slate devoted to legal and international affairs. He is a guest columnist for numerous other newspapers, and articles for professional and lay journals. He is often invited to testify regularly before Congress and administrative agencies by both Democrats and Republicans. He appears regularly on national and international television, cable, and radio programs as an expert in foreign affairs, international and constitutional law, telecommunications, terrorism, national security, and related subjects. He is a regular guest at the BBC, C-SPAN, CNN, Reuters, MSNBC, and NPR.
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Thomas J. DiLorenzo
“The Founding Father of Economic Statism”
Monday, February 2, 2009
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College, Maryland, and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He is the author or co-author of ten books, on subjects such as antitrust, group-interest politics, and interventionism generally.
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James Bovard
“Bailout Bosh and Other Economic Frauds of Our Times”
Thursday, November 13, 2008
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, January 2006), and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Korean.
The Wall Street Journal called Bovard “the roving inspector general of the modern state,” and The Washington Post columnist George Will called him a “one-man truth squad.” His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award as “Book of the Year”. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for civil liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.
His writings have been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.
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Peter J. Boettke
“Austrian Economics and the Present Crisis”
Monday, October 6, 2008
Peter J. Boettke is the Deputy Director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy, a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, and a professor in the economics department at George Mason University.
Boettke was born and raised in New Jersey. He received his BA in economics from Grove City College and his PhD in economics from George Mason University. Before joining the faculty at George Mason University in 1998, he held faculty positions at Oakland University, Manhattan College and New York University. In addition, Boettke was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University during the 1992-1993 academic year. He has been a visiting professor or scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena, Germany, the Stockholm School of Economics, Central European University in Prague and Charles University in Prague.
Boettke is the author of several books on the history, collapse and transition from socialism in the former Soviet Union — The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918-1928 (Kluwer, 1990); Why Perestroika Failed: The Economics and Politics of Socialism Transformation (Routledge, 1993); and Calculation and Coordination: Essays on Socialism and Transitional Political Economy (Routledge, 2001). He is also now the co-author, along with David Prychitko, of the classic principles of economics texts of Paul Heyne’s The Economic Way of Thinking (10th Edition, Prentice Hall, 2002).
Boettke has also edited the following volumes, Socialism and the Market: The Socialist Calculation Debate Revisited, 9 volumes (Routledge, 2000); The Legacy of F. A. Hayek: Politics, Philosophy, Economics, 3 volumes (Elgar, 1999), The Market Process, 2 volumes (Elgar, 1998), Market Process: Essays in Contemporary Austrian Economics (Elgar, 1994), The Collapse of Development Planning (New York University Press, 1994), and The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics (Elgar, 1994).
In 1998, Boettke assumed the editorship of the Review of Austrian Economics (Kluwer Academic Publishers). The Review of Austrian Economics was founded by late Murray Rothbard in mid-1980s to promote research and the further development of the Austrian School of Economics. Prior to assuming that editorship, Boettke was the editor of Advances in Austrian Economics.K Since the mid-1990s, Boettke has also been the Director of the Advanced Summer Seminar in Austrian Economics, a post he took over from Israel Kirzner. Boettke is a former President of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics.
In addition to his scholarly activities, Boettke is a dedicated teacher and has won teaching awards, including the Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He has taught in the Honors College Programs at Oakland University, New York University and George Mason University. Beyond economics, Boettke is also an affiliated faculty member in the Russian Studies Program; has taught at the Law School; and served on dissertation committees in the School of Public Policy.
