Portal:Libertarianism/Selected biography

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Lew Rockwell is a prominent anarcho-capitalist who in 1982 founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He continues to serve in a leadership capacity as its president. He also is Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California, and publisher of the political weblog LewRockwell.com. Rockwell was closely associated with his teacher and colleague Murray Rothbard until Rothbard's death in 1995. Rockwell's political ideology, like Rothbard's in his later years, combines a form of anarcho-capitalism with cultural conservatism and the Austrian School of economics. He also advocates federalist concepts as a means of promoting freedom from central government, and also advocates secession for the same political decentralist reasons. Rockwell has called environmentalism "[a]n ideology as pitiless and Messianic as Marxism."

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Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˌnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual. Chomsky is often viewed as a notable figure in contemporary philosophy.

Beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. He has since established himself as a prominent and prolific political philosopher and commentator; he is a self-declared anarcho-syndicalist as an adherent of libertarian socialism, which he regards as "the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society."

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Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician at the University of Chicago, and recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Among scholars, he is best known for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy. He was an economic advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Over time, many governments practiced his restatement of a political philosophy that extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with little intervention by government. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, based at the University of Chicago, he had great influence in determining the research agenda of the entire profession. Milton Friedman's works, which include many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos, and lectures, cover a broad range of topics of microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."

Friedman was originally a Keynesian, a supporter of the New Deal and an advocate of government intervention in the economy. However, his 1950s reinterpretation of the Keynesian consumption function challenged the standard Keynesian model of that time. At the University of Chicago, Friedman became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural rate of unemployment," and argued that governments could not change this natural rate. He argued that the Phillips Curve was not stable, and predicted that then-existing Keynesian policies would cause high inflation and minimal growth (later termed stagflation). Friedman's claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective during depression conditions, and that large-scale deficit spending by the government is needed to decrease mass unemployment. Though opposed to the existence of the Federal Reserve, Friedman argued that, given that it does exist, a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy, and he warned against efforts by a treasury or central bank to do otherwise.

Influenced by his close friend George Stigler, Friedman opposed government regulation of many types. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Friedman's political philosophy, which he considered classically liberal and libertarian, emphasized the advantages of free market economics and the disadvantages of government intervention and regulation, strongly influencing the opinions of American conservatives and libertarians. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. His books and essays were well read and were even circulated illegally in Communist countries.

Most economists during the 1960s rejected Friedman's economic views, but since then they have had an increasing international influence (especially in the United States and United Kingdom). Some of his laissez-faire ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation were used by governments, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory has had a large influence on economists such as Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis of 2007–2010.

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Bill Redpath is the chairman of the United States Libertarian Party, first elected by delegates to the 2006 Libertarian National Convention in Portland, Oregon in July 2006. He was re-elected by delegates to the 2008 Libertarian National Convention in Denver, Colorado on May 26, 2008.

Born and raised in Findlay, Ohio, Redpath attended Indiana University and then earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. Currently a resident of Leesburg, Virginia, Redpath is the Vice President of a financial consulting firm.

Redpath joined the Libertarian Party in 1984, and served as chairman of the Virginia Libertarian Party from 1989–1991, and the national treasurer for the Libertarian Party from 1991–1993 and from 2003–2004. He ran twice for the Virginia state legislature in the 1990s and for Governor of Virginia in 2001 receiving 0.8% of the vote. He is noted with the Libertarian Party for his ballot access work; during his tenure as chairman of the LP's Ballot Access Committee, the LP achieved ballot access in all 50 states in two consecutive elections (1992 and 1996) Redpath currently serves as Treasurer for FairVotein Takoma Park, MD and is on the Advisory Committee of Virginians for Instant Runoff Voting .

In January 2008, Redpath announced his intention to seek the Libertarian nomination for the US Senate seat being vacated by Senator John Warner. On March 29, 2008, the Libertarian Party of Virginia state convention voted to nominate him as the party's official candidate.

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Mary J. Ruwart, Ph. D. (born October 16, 1949) is a libertarian speaker, writer, activist and was a leading candidate for the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nomination. She is the author of the bestselling 1992 book Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle.

A member of the Libertarian Party, Ruwart campaigned unsuccessfully for the party's presidential nomination in 1984 and for the vice-presidential nomination in 1992. Ruwart was the Libertarian Party of Texas's nominee for U.S. Senate in 2000, where she faced incumbent Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison; Ruwart polled 1.16% of the popular vote (72,798 votes), finishing fourth behind Green Party candidate Douglas Sandage.

Ruwart has served on the Libertarian National Committee, and was a keynote speaker at the 2004 Libertarian National Convention. In 2002, libertarians launched an unsuccessful lobbying campaign to get Dr. Ruwart appointed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner. Additionally, Ruwart has served on the boards of the International Society for Individual Liberty, the Fully Informed Jury Association, and the Michigan chapter of the Heartland Institute. She is part of the anarcho-capitalist wing of the LP.

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Adam Smith

Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723 – died 17 July 1790 [OS: 5 June 1723 – 17 July 1790]) was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. It earned him an enormous reputation and would become one of the most influential works on economics ever published. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism.

Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith returned home and spent the next ten years writing The Wealth of Nations, publishing it in 1776. He died in 1790.

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Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School who helped define modern libertarianism and founded a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism". Rothbard took the Austrian School's emphasis on spontaneous order and condemnation of central planning to an individualist anarchist conclusion.

An individualist anarchist of the Austrian School of economics, Rothbard associated with the Objectivists in his early thirties before allying with the New Left in the 1960s and eventually joining the radical caucus of the Libertarian Party.

In the course of his life, Rothbard was associated with a number of political thinkers and movements. During the early 1950s, he studied under the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, along with George Reisman. Then he began working for the William Volker Fund. During the late 1950s, Rothbard was an associate of Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, a relationship later lampooned in his unpublished play Mozart Was a Red. In the late 1960s, Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement, on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. However, Rothbard later criticized the New Left for not truly being against the draft and supporting a "People's Republic" style draft. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch, which existed from 1965 to 1968. From 1969 to 1984 he edited The Libertarian Forum, also initially with Hess (although Hess' involvement ended in 1971). In 1977, he established the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which he edited until his death in 1995.

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Ayn Rand (/ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982), born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (Russian: Алиса Зиновьевна Розенбаум), was a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright and screenwriter. She is widely known for her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism. Rand advocated rational individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, categorically rejecting socialism, altruism, and religion. Her ideas remain both influential and controversial.

Rand considered the initiation of force or fraud to be immoral, and held that government action should consist only in protecting citizens from criminal aggression (via the police), foreign aggression (via the military), and in maintaining a system of courts to decide guilt or innocence for objectively defined crimes and to resolve disputes. Her politics are generally described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second.

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Lysander Spooner (19 January 1808 – 14 May 1887) was a libertarian, individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, and legal theorist of the 19th century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government. He has been identified by some contemporary writers as an anarcho-capitalist, while other writers and activists believe he was anti-capitalist for vocalizing opposition to wage labor.

Later known as an early individualist anarchist, Spooner advocated what he called Natural Law – or the "Science of Justice" – wherein acts of initiatory coercion against individuals and their property were considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violated only man-made legislation were not.

He believed that the price of borrowing capital could be brought down by competition of lenders if the government de-regulated banking and money. This he believed would stimulate entrepreneurship. In his Letter to Cleveland, Spooner argued, "All the great establishments, of every kind, now in the hands of a few proprietors, but employing a great number of wage labourers, would be broken up; for few or no persons, who could hire capital and do business for themselves would consent to labour for wages for another." Spooner took his own advice and started his own business called American Letter Mail Company which competed with the U.S. Post Office.

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Ronald Ernest Paul (born August 20, 1935) is a Republican United States Congressman from Lake Jackson, Texas, a physician, a bestselling author, and the fourth-place finisher in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries.

Originally from the Green Tree suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Gettysburg College in 1957, then studied at Duke University School of Medicine; after his 1961 graduation and a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, he became a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, serving outside the Vietnam War zone. He later represented Texas districts in the U.S. House of Representatives (1976–1977, 1979–1985, and 1997–present). He entered the 1988 presidential election, running as the Libertarian nominee while remaining a registered Republican, and placed a distant third.

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