Tom Woods opening speech at the 2014 Mises University.  Tom Woods is one of the leading proponents of Austrian Economics today.  His humor and style allows him to bring across Austrian economics to a much wider audience than would be expected considering that most people consider economics a boring topic.

An interesting point that Tom Woods brings up, no one in the liberty movement is talking about the Chicago School of Economics, all the enthusiasm seems to be with the Austrian School of Economics. In my opinion, this is great. The Chicago School has never really gone after the Federal Reserve.  In the opinion of Milton Friedman, the Federal Reserve did not inflate enough during the Great Depression!  The Austrian School holds the complete opposite opinion, not only did government inflation of the money supply prolong the depression but the inflation of the money supply from 1925 until 1929 caused the stock market boom in the 1920’s that eventually led to the wall-street crash.  To the Austrians, booms are inevitably caused by manipulation of the money supply, and in turn, always lead to a bust.  The Chicago School does not hold this view.  They are almost totally Keynesian when it comes to the Federal Reserve.  This is difference between the two schools of thought is massive.   If we believe in liberty, we can not ignore the Federal Reserve.  If we believe in intellectual consistency*, we cannot ignore the Federal Reserve.  Only the Austrian school of economics has been consistently critical of the Federal Reserve.  We should all be grateful that this school of thought still exists, otherwise there would have been no intellectual criticism of the disaster in 2008 and the future disaster that is coming.

Tom Woods at Mises U.

*Even though the Chicago School is free market on most topics, it totally ignores the monopolization of money and banking of the Federal Reserve.   The Chicago school is rightly critical of monopolies and cartels except for the biggest cartel of all, the Federal Reserve.