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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.

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.

He is the author or co-author of ten books, on subjects such as antitrust, group-interest politics, and interventionism generally.

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.

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.

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.

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.