Portal:Libertarianism/Selected biography

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Selected biography

Portal:Libertarianism/Selected biography/1

Adam Smith 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 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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Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist and author who was a prominent member of the French Liberal School.

Bastiat developed the economic concept of opportunity cost and introduced the parable of the broken window. He was also a Freemason and member of the French National Assembly.

As a strong advocate of classical liberalism and the economics of Adam Smith, his views favouring free trade and opposing protectionism provided a basis for libertarian capitalism and the Austrian School.

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Lysander Spooner was a libertarian, individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement and legal theorist of the 19th century.

Spooner is also known for competing with the United States Post Office Department 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 as he believed this 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 Post Office.

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Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author and lecturer who is also a 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 United States 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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Murray Bookchin was an American anarchist and libertarian socialist author, orator, historian and political theorist. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin initiated the critical theory of social ecology within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs and ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) and The Ecology of Freedom (1982).

In the late 1990s, Bookchin became disenchanted with the increasingly apolitical lifestylism of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets as well as the democratic confederalism of Rojava.

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Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician at the University of Chicago and recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

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 John Maynard 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 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.

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Murray Newton Rothbard 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".

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. He then 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, born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, 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 altruism, religion and socialism. 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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Portal:Libertarianism/Selected biography/9

Ronald Ernest Paul 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 and then studied at Duke University School of Medicine. After his 1961 graduation and a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, he became an Air Force flight surgeon, serving outside the Vietnam War zone.

Paul later represented Texas districts in the United States House of Representatives (1976–1977, 1979–1985 and 1997–2013). 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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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 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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Portal:Libertarianism/Selected biography/11
Mary J. Ruwart 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 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 S. 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 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.

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Bill Redpath is the chairman of the 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 a Master of Business Administration 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 as during his tenure as chairman of the Libertarian Party's Ballot Access Committee it achieved ballot access in all 50 states in two consecutive elections (1992 and 1996). Redpath currently serves as treasurer for FairVote.

In January 2008, Redpath announced his intention to seek the Libertarian nomination for the Senate seat being vacated by Senator John Warner.

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Walter Edward Block is an American Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist.

Block currently holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University, New Orleans. He is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He is best known for his 1976 book Defending the Undefendable, which takes contrarian positions in defending acts which are illegal or disreputable, but Block argues are actually victimless crimes or benefit the public.

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Randy Evan Barnett is an American lawyer, law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts; and legal theorist. He writes about the libertarian theory of law and contract theory, constitutional law and jurisprudence.

After attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barnett worked as a prosecutor in Chicago, Illinois. Barnett's first academic position was at the Chicago-Kent College of Law of the Illinois Institute of Technology. He later became the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Law at Boston University, where he served as the faculty adviser for the Federalist Society. He joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in 2006. Barnett is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute and the Goldwater Institute. His book The Structure of Liberty won the Ralph Gregory Elliot Book Award in 1998. In 2008, he was awarded a Fellowship in Constitutional Studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-born American Austrian School economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher, who is also associated with the alt-right. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.

Hoppe identifies as a culturally conservative libertarian. His remarks on the rights of property owners to establish private covenant communities, from which homosexuals and political dissidents may be "physically removed", has provoked controversy among both the libertarian community and Hoppe's colleagues at Lee Business School. Hoppe also garners controversy due to his support for restrictive limits on immigration, particularly of non-whites, which critics argue is at odds with libertarianism and anarchism.

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Steven "Steve" Wynn Kubby is a Libertarian Party activist who played a key role in the drafting and passage of California Proposition 215. The proposition was a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana which was approved by voters in 1996. Kubby himself is well-known as a cancer patient who relies on this medicine. He has authored two books on drug policy reform, The Politics of Consciousness and Why Marijuana Should Be Legal. He was the Libertarian Party candidate for Governor of California in 1998. In 2008, he declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party's 2008 presidential nomination and received significant support for the nomination, but was eliminated after the second ballot.

In 1999, Kubby and his wife Michele were arrested and faced trial for growing his own cannabis in his home, though he was entitled to do so legally on behalf of himself and his wife, also a licensed cannabis patient. Calling his arrest the "Scopes monkey trial of medical marijuana", Kubby remained defiant in his support of the Compassionate Use Act. He maintains that the prosecution was politically motivated, implicating then-Attorney General Dan Lungren's office.

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