George Reisman
I’ve long been a great admirer of Objectivist economist George Reisman, author of the towering Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996). I devoured his book The Government Against the Economy (1979) and other writing in college and have listened to many of his lectures and courses.
I think the first time I met George was when I presented “The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property,” which later became Against Intellectual Property, at the Mises Institute’s Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn, Alabama, on March 25, 2000. I believe he had recently split with the Ayn Rand Institute, and had reunited with his old friend Ralph Raico at the Mises Institute event. George was standing in the back of the room during my lecture and his questions to me indicated he was a bit stunned at my argument.
In any case, he had long offered for sale a 10-CD lecture set, “Reisman’s Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism.” I suggested he might want to put them online so people could more easily access them. His own website, capitalism.net, was in disrepair and there was no immediately obvious way to remedy this, so I volunteered to organize the material and host it on my site, and upload it to Youtube, which I did: George Reisman’s Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism.
Jeffrey Tucker and I have warned libertarians for years that their work could be lost because of copyright and standard publishing models and paywalls which can make it hard for people to access the work, or to republish or reuse it after they are gone. 1
I discussed this with George and he has decided to free all his work, to which he holds copyright, upon his death, by means of a CC-BY 4.0 dedication and license grant, which he gave me permission to post here (pdf).
- See How long copyright terms make art disappear; First Amendment Defense Act of 2021; Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant, Authors: Don’t Make the Buddy Holly Mistake, On Leading by Example and the Power of Attraction (Open Source Publishing, Creative Commons, Public Pomain Publishing), and Do Business Without Intellectual Property (Liberty.me, 2014); also Jeffrey A. Tucker, Authors: Beware of Copyright (also on LewRockwell.com and in his Bourbon for Breakfast) (Along with related chapters: “”If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?”, “Is Intellectual Property the Key to Success?”, “Books, Online and Off,” and “Mises.org in the Context of Publishing History”). [↩]
