I've already posted 2 other questions and I thank you for the response to them. You're giving me lots of great things for my paper!
How did you come to subscribe to Austrian Economics?
I started getting into it when someone told me to watch the Zeitgeist video and I became aware of how the Federal Reserve operated...and here I am today!
-Tyler Jewell
Got interested in Economics when I listened to the market and political news in early 07. Began reading. Am a mathematician and engineer. The Keynsian and Neo-Clasicists math is terrible, unbelievably bad, unworkable. It make me furious. There absolutely has to be something better. Something that won't make me mad and that I enjoy reading and learning.
Ever since I was young I enjoyed some aspects of politics; as I got older, that interest grew.
Later on, in my adult years, I took more and more of an interest in it, large, in part, thanks to a close friend who a physicist and amateur Austrian economist. Anyway, I eventually started studying some of it on my own, but, it's really only in the most recent years that I've taken an interest in it.
Ultimately, Austrian econ just makes sense to me, and is also the most liberty-based economics system I've seen to date, and it's a system that most coincides with my Biblical beliefs.
Resident Christian Anarcho-Capitalist.
I was actually gradually led into AE through the Firefox extension StumbleUpon. Zeitgeist made me interested in economics after its discussion of the FED and FRB, and after that it was only a matter of time before I'd found Libertarianism. I added some more pro-liberty sites to my favorites, and one day StumbleUpon brought me a Mises Institute article. It made sense, and was well written so I favorited it, but it quickly fell out of my mind. Over a month or so, though, I'd racked up 15 Mises articles and I finally realized they were all from the same site (I'd never paid attention to the banner, really, and ran through the text) so I decided to bookmark the Mises homepage and ever since I've been reading the daily articles and spreading the good news of AE.
I read Callahan's Economics for Real People and Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson to introduce myself to economics, still I didn't really have much of an idea what AE was about, or what seperated it from other schools of thought, so I suppose it was only after reading Hoppe's Economic Science and the Austrian Method that I became an adherent to AE.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan
I would read the paper, "you suck" and so do you. You both suck. Despised politicians in general. I knew no labels fit me properly, I was on my own - though I didn't know what I was. I thought I was the only one. "None make any sense."
Whilst overseas, I had time to read. I wanted to read the classics. So I got The Republic - Plato, Ethics - Aristotle, Machiavelli - The Prince...
Loved Ethics. Looking at the modern day I became a Chomskyite (not fully fledged, but I was well on my way), he made sense on Foreign Policy - US was an Empire etc. I was listening to one of his videos (his voice literally points you asleep / into a trance) and someone had spammed "Ron Paul - America's Last Hope".
Who is Ron Paul? I asked. And then I found out. About 3 days of trying to find something overtly wrong with the guy, I couldn't.
Slowly shed fallacies, but also pushed me into all his positions. Regulation is bad, interventionism is bad etc. I believed him, he was honest, integrity, he got ridiculed by the Republicans - must be good right?
Then I knew the positions and soundbites, but not the underlying why and how. I think Rally of the Republic, Woods speech - "Austrian Economics getting cheered". - So I thought I need to see what the fuss was all about.
5 months listening to basically all the Mises Audio etc. Reading pdf's, articles on here and LewRockwell... and viola.
I think I hated the politicans and political parties enough, all I was looking for was a reason / justification to get rid of them hah.. I found it.
It seems a lot of people came to AE because of Ron Paul. I confess I'm no different. Sometimes I've found the truth just grabs you with its simplicity and consistency, and I've found this with my study of mathematics and the natural sciences as well, although I'm cautious enough not use it as a ground for verification, I've found it to be a good guiding light and it helped lead me to AE.
I was somewhat free market in the past, but I feel I was still very much uneducated. What really sparked things off for me was after hearing Ron Paul mention it a few times and then hearing an excellent interview Israel Kirzner gave about AE. It's still on youtube actrually:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjctX7hmYLY
"When the King is far the people are happy." Chinese proverb
For Alexander Zinoviev and the free market there is a shared delight:
"Where there are problems there is life."
I came to it via Objectivism.
Jon Irenicus:Insofar as it is an extension of Aristotelianism, right?
Indeed
I never liked the government. Never voted. Knew it was stupid and a sham when I was around 15 or 16. I love the wilderness so I knew life is more than just about Statism. Politics was easily seen as being redundant and full of broken promises. Never saw why I needed to pay attention to politics in the first place. What does it have to do with life? Nothing other than what they mess up and intervene upon that's what. You can actually walk around in the wilderness, use your wits, and survive without a State ever being in your life. I've thought about voting from time to time, but I succeeded a long time ago but can only leave on my own only so far. I could have left further, thought about it during some years I dropped out of society and camped and backpacked a lot. But I decided I wanted a wife more than I wanted to totally drop out into the wilderness.
I knew something was messed up with the government, but couldn't put it into a more detailed picture other than I knew I couldn't live a self-reliant lifestyle without the government stepping in and wanting taxes. Can't pay those with corn and beans. Then for some reason with this bailout stuff last autumn I honed in and saw where much of the problems and power of this government centered around. I realized the President might as well be a CEO a long time ago, but I didn't know enough about the government to see the Federal Reserves role in such detail. Paulson was going on about possible great depression, and I started preparing for hard times ever since. The government creates so much uncertainty and just screws things up.
While I was on the internet trying to learn more about the Federal Reserve I came across the EndtheFed protests. I went to the one nearby last November I believe it was. I met somebody at the protest that was going to do a write up for Restore the Republic radio and so when I came back from the protest I tuned into that internet radio. They were playing live streams from different endthefed protest sites across the country. I then heard more about Ron Paul. I heard of him before on TV and from friends at work, but as I said I wasn't interested in politics so blew it off. I ended up learning about Austrian Economics and the Mises Institute from Ron Paul.
Basically I still just want a simple self-reliant lifestyle and desire the State to just go away and let us use our brains without the State fumbling it all up.
I was always an Austrian really - even when I ostensibly accepted Keynesianism I couldn't really countenance all the internal contradictions.
Then I discovered this site when I was researching Frederic Bastiat. I was always extremely liberal [traditional definition], but then I became an Austrian, and eventually and inevitably moved to spider-capitalism.
The difference between libertarianism and socialism is that libertarians will tolerate the existence of a socialist community, but socialists can't tolerate a libertarian community.
Thedesolateone:and eventually and inevitably moved to spider-capitalism.
I just spit my milk.
liberty student: Thedesolateone:and eventually and inevitably moved to spider-capitalism. I just spit my milk.
Arachno capitalism, geddit
Thedesolateone:Arachno capitalism, geddit
I spit because I got it. Well placed.
I am majoring in economics and political science, and the classical view has always made an impression on me. To that extent, I've always been a free-market capitalist, although I never really understood the relationship between the government and the economy (in regards to the business cycle) until I read Meltdown. So, Thomas Woods' book is what probably brought me towards the Austrian School of Economics. Although, even after reading that book I wasn't completely a "fellow traveller", since I read New Deal or Raw Deal? which does cover the New Deal accurately, but attributes the depression to the credit contraction as a result of the Fed's actions (in other words, the book asserts that the Fed contracted credit and caused the pression). So, I read Rothbard's America's Great Depression next and that was what probably immersed me into the world of Austrian Economics.
My "Austrian book" binge (where I've read about a book every three days, except for de Soto's Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, which is probably going to take me a couple of weeks to read and then several years of re-reading to really get it all) is a result of my term paper for economics, which deals with the Great Depression, the New Deal and how we're headed down a similar path currently.
But, it's really turned into a drug. Before Austrian Economics took up all of my spare time, I used to actually write for Wikipedia; I wrote mostly on tanks and battles of the Second World War (I managed to get fourteen articles promoted to "featured article status"). And so, this is really a radical shift in my interests. My library has grown rather quickly (ten books in about a month or two, although admittedly one of them is Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbelence), and I just can't stop reading.
Fortunately, most of my university education is Keynesian, so it gives me an opportunity to study both schools; otherwise, I'd be focusing on the Austrian school, and I think that in order to become the best possible economist I must have an understanding of all schools and understand why other school of thoughts are incorrect.
By listening to Jim Rogers and Peter Schiff.