Mark Skousen Interview

A great interview with Mormon economist and liberty-lover Mark Skousen was just published. An excerpt:

Daily Bell: Give us some background as to how you became an Austrian economist? How did you discover them and when?

Mark Skousen: My father, Leroy Skousen, was like his brother Cleon, involved in the conservative anti-communist movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and he had copies of books such as Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises on his shelf in our home in Portland, Oregon. I also read regularly National Review and The Freeman that referred to the writings of Austrian economists such as Mises and Friedrich Hayek. I read Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, which whetted my appetite for more. But it wasn’t until I discovered the writings of Murray Rothbard that I became enamored with Austrian economics, especially his books America’s Great Depression and What Has the Government Done to Our Money? By the early 1970s, I was hooked, and even took Rothbard’s magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State on my honeymoon. Admittedly, I didn’t get much reading done.

Daily Bell: When did you know that elaborating on free-market economics was going to be your life’s work?

Mark Skousen: I took a course in economics in high school, and found it so poorly taught that I figured I could do better. By the time I went to college in the mid-1960s, I decided economics would be my major because it involved so many facets that interested me – politics, history, money, mathematics, and journalism. I wanted to major in something that was diverse and not too specialized, since I was interested in so many things in life. So I ended up getting a B. A. in economics, an M. S. in economics, and a Ph.D. in economics! (And surprisingly, I was able to do all this without ever taking a class in accounting or finance.)

Read the rest here.