Writes a friend:

Here is a fascinating vignette from Reason TV: Whole Foods entrepreneur John Mackey seems to surprise Welch when he tries to explain why he sells products his customers want to buy, even though he doesn’t personally like such products. More important, when asked to list his libertarian influences, he includes Smith, Mill, Hayek, and Mises.

Gillespie interrupts and says, “How did you come across Mises? Because he’s, even today, among a lot of libertarians, he’s fairly obscure. Do you remember how you kind of stumbled across him?

Mackey: “In a lot of ways I think he’s the one that had the biggest impact on me. I loved his work. I just thought he was brilliant when I read him.”

Mackey then says his “awakening” came from reading a lot of libertarian books “voraciously.” He singles out Socialism and Human Action as excellent, and credits Mises for explaining how markets work. He goes on:

“Also, I don’t think von Mises and Hayek and the other Austrian economists have gotten enough credit for…their theory of the business cycle. I really do think we are experiencing…what Austrian business cycle predicts. If you print a lot of money and you send it through the economy you’ll have certain bubbles and those create market distortions and if the bubble’s big enough and it goes on long enough when it pops, it creates great harm in the society. I think that’s what we’re living through right now. That kind of bubble in the stock market and the real estate market.”

Then Gillespie changes the subject. But what’s most telling is he thought Mises was “obscure” among libertarians. If this was once true, and I do not believe it ever was, it’s not anymore. These days, when most people think of libertarianism, I am confident they think of the Mises Institute. Certainly all libertarians have heard of Mises, who is coming to dominate the economic thinking of this generation of libertarians. Good to see that Mackey, unlike some beltway types and neolibertarians, gives proper credit to the great Austrians and their theory of credit expansion.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.