The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World

Foreword

In 1971, in the midst of a busy day in my medical practice, I took a long lunch to drive 60 miles to the University of Houston to hear one of the last formal lectures given by the great Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. He was 90 at the time, but still as passionate and articulate as ever. Here was the man whose writings had been my main inspiration to absorb and champion Austrian economics, which has dominated my thinking ever since.

I had been first introduced to the Austrians while I was a medical student at Duke University and came across a copy of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. After that, I spent much of my free time reading everything I could find from the Austrian School. Along with Hayek and Mises, the works of Murray Rothbard and Hans Sennholz gave me a “new” view of economics.

Before discovering the Austrian School, I did not fully understand the process of how free markets work. The Austrians illustrated for me the benefits of free market economies relative to interventionist, centrally planned economies. The more I read, the clearer it became to me that this was how truly free individuals living in a truly free society should interact with one another. Austrian economists were also arguing for free markets at a time when the majority of intellectuals were praising collectivism and socialism. To this day, I owe the Austrians a debt of gratitude.

What I had thought were new ideas about the relationship between economic and personal liberties had, ...