This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2008 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia.
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Johns Hopkins University, and he has been a member of the faculty at the University of Washington (1968-83), Lafayette College (1983-89), and Seattle University (1989-94) and a visiting professor at the University of Economics in Prague (2006). He has also presented a series of lectures and has supervised and examined doctoral candidates in economics at Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala. He was a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1971-72), and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University (1973-74).
Higgs is the author of eight books, the most recent of which are Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (2006) and Neither Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government (2007). Of his five edited or co-edited books, the most recent are Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy (with Carl Close, 2005) and The Challenge of Liberty: Classical Liberalism Today (with Carl Close, 2006). A contributor to many scholarly volumes, he is also the author of more than 100 articles and reviews in the professional journals of economics, demography, history, and public policy.
His popular articles have appeared in many leading newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Financial Times; in many magazines, including Reason, The Freeman, and Liberty; and at many Web sites. He has appeared on many network radio and television programs, including NPR, NBC, ABC, C-SPAN, PBS, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, and on scores of local radio and television programs, and he has been interviewed for articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al-Ahram Weekly, Investor’s Business Daily, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, Folha de São Paulo, Christian Science Monitor, and many other news media.
