Speakers at FFF Events

• Gerald P. O’Driscoll
  
  

  Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. is the Director for The Heritage Foundation’s Center for International Trade and Economics, which explores the link between free-trade policies and economic growth. The center was founded to provide state-of-the-art research on the role economic freedom plays in fostering economic growth around the world. Dr. O’Driscoll is a recognized expert on international trade and finance, monetary policy, and regulatory issues. He is chief spokesman on international economic issues for Heritage. He also directs all research efforts on global trade and international financial institutions.

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• Mancur Olson (1932-1998)
  
  

  Mancur Olson was Chair and Principal Investigator of IRIS and Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. Professor Olson is recognized as one of a handful of scholars responsible for changing the field of economics to ensure that politics became an integral part of economic thinking and policy formation. His work emphasized that a country’s economic policies and the quality of its legal institutions primarily determine its economic performance. The Center on Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector (IRIS) was launched under Olson’s direction in 1990 with support of the US Agency for International Development to apply his thinking to the problems of developing countries and those undergoing the transition from communism.

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• Ralph Raico
  
  

  Ralph Raico is professor of European history at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, where the head of his dissertation committee was F.A. Hayek. Among Dr. Raico's articles and essays are: "Rethinking Churchill" in The Costs of War, John V. Denson, ed.; "Austrian Economics and Classical Liberalism," in Advances in Austrian Economics, vol. II; "The Theory of Economic Development and the 'European Miracle,'" in The Collapse of Economic Planning, Peter J. Boettke, ed.; "Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes," in Requiem for Marx, Yuri N. Maltsev, ed.; and Classical Liberalism in the Twentieth Century. Dr. Raico has also contributed to The Review of Austrian Economics, the Zeitschrift fur Wirtschaftspolitik,the Cato Journal,and other scholarly journals. He is the translator of Ludwig von Mises's Liberalism and of essays by F.A. Hayek contained in Hayek's Collected Works. Dr. Raico was editor of the New Individualist Review and senior editor of Inquiry. He has lectured widely in Europe, the United States, and Canada, and is fellow in social thought at the Cato Institute.

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• Andrea Millen Rich
  
  

  Former President of Laissez Faire Books, she bought the assets of Laissez Faire Books from John Muller in 1982. Shortly thereafter she and her husband acquired the Libertarian Review Foundation and folded Laissez Faire Books into it. In 1990 they changed LRF’s name to Center for Independent Thought, to more accurately reflect its various projects. She read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in college and later attended her lectures at The Nathaniel Branden Institute for several years. She was very involved with the Libertarian Party, both nationally and in New York, from 1972 to 1983. During that period, she spent much time getting radicalized in Murray Rothbard’s living room.

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• Sheldon Richman
  
  

  Sheldon Richman is editor of Ideas on Liberty, 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 FFF's newest book 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..."

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• Mario J. Rizzo
  
  

  Dr. Mario J. Rizzo is associate professor of economics and co-director of the Austrian Economics Program at New York University. He received his BA from Fordham University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He was also a fellow in law and economics at the University of Chicago and at Yale University. He currently lectures for the Institute for Humane Studies and is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.

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• Paul Rubin
  
  

  Paul H. Rubin is Professor of Economics and Law at Emory University and editor-in-chief of Managerial and Decision Economics. He is a Fellow of the Public Choice Society, an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and former Vice President of the Southern Economics Association.

  Dr. Rubin has been Senior Staff Economist at President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, Chief Economist at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Director of Advertising Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, and vice-president of Glassman-Oliver Economic Consultants, Inc., a litigation consulting firm in Washington. He has taught economics at the University of Georgia, City University of New York, VPI, and George Washington University Law School.

  Dr. Rubin has written or edited seven books and published over one hundred articles and chapters on economics, law, and regulation.  His work has been cited in the professional literature about 1300 times.  He has consulted widely on litigation related matters and has addressed numerous business, professional, policy and academic audiences. Dr. Rubin received his B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1970.

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• Joseph Salerno
  
  

  Joseph Salerno is a senior fellow at Ludwig von Mises Institute, professor of economics at Pace University, and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.  He has been interview in the in the Austrian Economics Newsletter and on  Mises.org.

  
  
  
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• George Selgin
  
  

  Dr. Selgin obtained his Ph.D. from New York University in 1986, and was a faculty member at George Mason University and the University of Hong Kong before joining the economics department at the University of Georgia in 1989.  His principal research areas are monetary and banking theory, monetary history, and macroeconomics.  He also dabbles in the history of economic thought.  His current major research project is on the theory and history of private coinage. Two other topics that have always interested him are free banking and deflation.

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• Mark Skousen
  
  

  Known as the “maverick” of economics for his contrarian and optimistic views, his sometimes-outrageous statements and predictions, Mark Skousen is a college professor, prolific author and world-renowned speaker. He’s made his unique sense of market and investment trends known and respected in the financial world. With a Ph.D. in economics and a focus on the principles of free-market capitalism and Austrian economics, Mark Skousen has often gone contrary to the crowd in his investment choices and economic predictions — and has often been proved right.

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