This speech was given at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s June 2007 conference, “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia.
Richard M. Ebeling, former Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan, was named the President of the Foundation for Economic Education in May 2003.
Richard discovered the freedom philosophy as a teenager while attending Hollywood High in Los Angeles, when he came across The Freeman and the writings of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He earned a B.A. in economics at California State University, Sacramento, an M.A. at Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. at Middlesex University in London, England.
A passionate advocate of free markets and constitutionally limited government, Richard has written, edited, and contributed to over 30 books and has published numerous articles. He lectures extensively in the United States and around the world and is a popular guest on radio and television talk shows.
He has not only written and lectured about the cause of liberty, he has also lived it. In 1991, while consulting on market reform and privatization in the former Soviet Union, he joined the defenders of freedom and faced the Soviet tanks in Vilnius, Lithuania, and again in Moscow, Russia, during the attempted hard-line communist insurrection.
In 1996 he discovered the “lost papers” of Ludwig von Mises in a formerly secret KGB archive in Moscow and brought to America copies of virtually the entire collection of 10,000 pages. He is currently completing the editorial work of the papers, Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, published by Liberty Fund.
Richard and his wife, Anna, along with their chocolate lab “Ludwig von Mises IV,” live on the Foundation’s grounds in Irvington, New York. They have a daughter, two granddaughters and a grandson who reside in Pasadena, California.
