WGary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.
WKakha Bendukidze was a Georgian statesman, businessman and philanthropist, regarded as the Man Who Remade Georgia, founder of the Knowledge Foundation and head of the supervisory board of Agricultural and Free Universities.
WWalter Edward Block is an American Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist. He currently holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans, and is a senior fellow of the non-profit think-tank 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.
WDonald Joseph Boudreaux is an American economist, author, professor, and co-director of the Program on the American Economy and Globalization at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
WJames McGill Buchanan Jr. was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, for which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute as well as of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, and professor at George Mason University.
WBryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and former contributor to the Freakonomics blog; he also publishes his own blog, EconLog. He is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
WKevin Carson is an American political writer and blogger. While he originally identified as a mutualist, he now describes himself as an anarchist without adjectives. He works as a Senior Fellow and Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at the Center for a Stateless Society. Carson coined the pejorative term "vulgar libertarianism" to describe the use of free market rhetoric in defense of corporate capitalism and economic inequality.
WTyler Cowen is an American economist. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education.
WChristopher J. Coyne is the F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the associate director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. He also serves as the director of graduate studies for the department of economics at GMU.
WAntony Davies is an American economist, speaker, and author. He is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
WThomas James DiLorenzo is an American economics professor at Loyola University Maryland Sellinger School of Business. He identifies as an adherent of the Austrian School of economics. He is a research fellow at The Independent Institute, a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Board of Advisors member at CFACT, and an associate of the Abbeville Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech.
WGene Epstein is an American economist. He worked as the economics editor of Barron's Magazine from 1993 to 2017. He calls himself a follower of the Austrian School of economics and is an associated scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
WJosé Luis Espert is an Argentine economist and politician who is known to be one of the strongest supporters of the economic liberalism in Argentina.
WFred Emanuel Foldvary was a lecturer in economics at San Jose State University, California, and a research fellow at The Independent Institute. He previously taught at Santa Clara University and other colleges. He was also a commentator and senior editor for the online journal The Progress Report and an associate editor of the online journal Econ Journal Watch. He served on the board of directors for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
WDavid Director Friedman is an American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and anarcho-capitalist theorist, described by Walter E. Block as a "free-market anarchist". Although he studied chemistry and physics and not law or economics, he is known for his textbook writings on microeconomics and the libertarian theory of anarcho-capitalism, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom. He has also authored several other books and articles, including Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1986), Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (2000), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), and Future Imperfect (2008).
WMilton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
WRose Director Friedman (; born Rose Director, was a free-market economist and co-founder of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.
WDr Constantin Gurdgiev is a Russian economist and professor based in Dublin, Ireland. He is a former editor of Business & Finance Magazine. Gurdgiev is well known in Ireland from his frequent appearances on the Tonight with Vincent Browne television show on TV3 during the great recession. Gurdgiev identifies as a libertarian.
WFloyd Arthur "Baldy" Harper was an American academic, economist and writer who was best known for founding the Institute for Humane Studies in 1961.
WFriedrich August von Hayek, often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British economist and philosopher who is best known for his defence of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for their work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics, leading to his prize.
WHenry Stuart Hazlitt was an American journalist who wrote about business and economics for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
WDavid Richard Henderson is a Canadian-born American economist and author who moved to the United States in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1986, serving on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. A research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 1990, he took a teaching position with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1984, and is now an emeritus professor of economics.
WRobert Higgs is an American economic historian and economist combining material from Public Choice, the New institutional economics, and the Austrian school of economics; and describes himself as a "libertarian anarchist" in political and legal theory and public policy. His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government power and growth.
WHans-Hermann Hoppe is an American paleolibertarian and anarcho-capitalist political theorist. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
WJesús Huerta de Soto Ballester is a Spanish economist of the Austrian School. He is a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, Spain and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
WJanusz Ryszard Korwin-Mikke "JKM" is a Polish far-right politician, paleolibertarian and author. He was a member of the European Parliament from 2014 until 2018. He was the leader of the Congress of the New Right (KNP), which was formed in 2011 from Liberty and Lawfulness, which he led from its formation in 2009, and the Real Politics Union, which he led from 1990 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2003. Currently, he is the chairman of the party KORWiN, and since 2019 he is a member of the Sejm, elected from the electoral list of Confederation Liberty and Independence.
WPeter T. Leeson is an American economist and the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. The website Big Think listed him in 2012 among "Eight of the World's Top Young Economists". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
WVakhtang (Vato) Lejava is a reform-minded Georgian, the Rector of the Free University of Tbilisi and the Agricultural University of Georgia and chief adviser to the prime minister of Georgia in 2009–2012.
WRoderick Tracy Long is an American professor of philosophy at Auburn University and left-libertarian blogger. He also serves as an editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, director and president of the Molinari Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society.
WDeirdre Nansen McCloskey is the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also adjunct professor of Philosophy and Classics there, and for five years was a visiting Professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctorates. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests include the origins of the modern world, the misuse of statistical significance in economics and other sciences, and the study of capitalism, among many others.
WJavier Gerardo Milei is an Argentine libertarian economist, author, radio conductor and public speaker sympathetic to the Austrian School of economic thought. He became widely known for his regular TV appearances where he has been critical of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Mauricio Macri and Alberto Fernández administrations. Milei considers himself to be a "short-term minarchist", although "philosophically an anarcho-capitalist".
WDaniel J. "Dan" Mitchell is a libertarian economist and former senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a proponent of the flat tax and tax competition, financial privacy, and fiscal sovereignty.
WRobert Patrick Murphy is an American economist. Murphy is Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He has been affiliated with Laffer Associates, the Pacific Research Institute, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), the Independent Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Fraser Institute.
WWilliam Arthur Niskanen was an American economist. He was one of the architects of President Ronald Reagan's economic program and contributed to public choice theory. He was also a long-time chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank.
WJosé Piñera Echenique is a Chilean economist, one of the famous Chicago Boys, who served as minister of Labor and Social Security, and of Mining, in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He is the architect of Chile's private pension system based on personal retirement accounts. Piñera has been called "the world's foremost advocate of privatizing public pension systems" as well as "the Pension Reform Pied Piper". He is now Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, President of the International Center for Pension Reform based in Santiago, Senior Fellow at the Italian libertarian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni, and member of the Advisory Board of the Vienna-based Educational Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe. He has a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Piñera is a Board Member in Chile and an active supporter of SOS Children's Villages, the largest orphan and abandoned children's charity in the world. Today, Piñera is director of the magazine Economía y Sociedad, that was relaunched in November 2016.
WBenjamin W. "Ben" Powell is the director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and Professor of Economics at Texas Tech University's Rawls College of Business. He is also a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the North American Editor of the Review of Austrian Economics.
WLawrence W. Reed, also known as Larry Reed, is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), where he has served as the Humphreys Family Senior Fellow since May 2019. Before joining FEE, Reed served as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland, Michigan based free-market think tank. To date, he remains Mackinac's president emeritus.
WRussell David "Russ" Roberts is an economist, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president designate of Shalem College. He is known for communicating economic ideas in understandable terms as host of the EconTalk podcast.
WMurray Newton Rothbard was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, economic historian and political theorist. Rothbard was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
WMurray Sabrin is a professor of finance in the Anisfield School of Business at Ramapo College and a perennial candidate for public office in New Jersey.
WPeter David Schiff is an American stock broker, financial commentator, and radio personality. He is CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a broker-dealer based in Westport, Connecticut. He is also involved in various roles in other financial services companies, including Euro Pacific Asset Management, an independent investment advisor, Schiff Gold, a precious metals dealer, and Euro Pacific Bank, a full-reserve bank.
WArthur Seldon, was joint founder president, with Ralph Harris, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, where he directed editorial affairs and publishing for more than thirty years. He is the father of political author Anthony Seldon.
WJames Shikwati is a Kenyan libertarian economist and Director of the Inter Region Economic Network who promotes freedom of trade as the driving solution to poverty in Africa. He has made comments which imply that aid towards Africa does more harm than good to their people, based on the central arguments that it is mainly used either by politicians as a tool to manipulate people and influence votes, or as a mechanism for dumping subsidised foreign agricultural products onto local markets at below cost making it nearly impossible for African farmers to compete.
WJulian Lincoln Simon was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
WMark Andrew Skousen is an American economist and writer. He currently teaches at Chapman University, where he is a Presidential Fellow at The George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics. He has previously taught at Columbia Business School, Mercy College, Barnard College, and Rollins College.
WVernon Lomax Smith is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He is formerly a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. He was also a founding board member of the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University.
WJason Sorens is a lecturer in the department of government at Dartmouth College. He has been an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University since 2008. His primary research interests include fiscal federalism, public policy in federal systems, secessionism, and ethnic politics. Sorens received his B.A. in economics and philosophy, with honors, from Washington and Lee University and his Ph.D in political science from Yale University. He is the founder of the Free State Project and president of Ethics & Economics Education of New England, an effort to boost ethical and economic literacy in New England through programs for high schoolers, opinion leaders, and the general public.
WThomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
WHerbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism whereby superior physical force shapes history. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.
WHeizō Takenaka is a Japanese economist, retired politician, and political activist. last serving as Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications and Minister of State for Privatization of the Postal Services in the cabinet of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. As of July 2007, he is a professor at Keio University and an advisor for other academic institutions and companies.
WWalter Edward Williams was an American economist, commentator, and academic.