If you're designing a collection around early punk, someone will have to represent the Sex Pistols. When you're thinking about Austrian economists, the person who's going to step into the shoes of Johnny Rotten is Ludwig Von Mises.
After he passed, his wife Margrit said this, "His most eminent qualities were his inflexible honesty, his unhesitating sincerity. He never yielded. He always freely enunciated what he considered to be true. If he had been prepared to suppress or only to soften his criticisms of popular, but irresponsible, policies, the most influential positions and offices would have been offered him. But he never compromised."
To us, that's John Lydon. Von Mises led. Von Mises had his friends, but he also had his enemies. This 1995 Reason interview with Milton Friedman, (excerpted on Von Mises wikipedia) can help make that argument.
"The story I remember best happened at the initial Mont Pelerin meeting when he got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists." We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view that there could be a justification for it. Another occasion which is equally telling: Fritz Machlup was a student of Mises's, one of his most faithful disciples. At one of the Mont Pelerin meetings, Machlup gave a talk in which I think he questioned the idea of a gold standard; he came out in favor of floating exchange rates. Mises was so mad he wouldn't speak to Machlup for three years. Some people had to come around and bring them together again. It's hard to understand; you can get some understanding of it by taking into account how people like Mises were persecuted in their lives."
Anyway, it's a lot of thought to put into a silly shirt, but that's who we are and that's who we think wears our clothing.
