On October 10, 1973, Austrian-born American economist, Ludwig von Mises (pictured above) died.
Two-hundred fifty-nine years earlier, the French law-maker and Jansenist Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert died.
Both economists were known for their defenses of freer markets: le Pesant for pioneering the critique of mercantilism, arguing that a nation’s wealth consisted in what its people produce and trade; Mises for systematizing economic theory and advancing the critique of both socialism and latter-day mercantilism (what he called “interventionism”).
Sixty years ago, on October 10, 1957, Ayn Rand’s dystopian/utopian novel Atlas Shrugged was published. Written to expound and defend a specifically individualist, freedom/free-market point of view, it is surely one of the most influential and literarily successful didactic novels ever written.