Welcome to Econ Talk brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host,

Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Today's our last show of 2006. We'll be back on January 8th. Just to preview some of the guests

and topics we've got scheduled for the new year. We've got Mike Munger on price gouging,

Bruce Yandell on the politics of strange bedfellows in the tobacco settlement,

John Vogel, the founder of Vanguard, talking about mutual funds and capitalism,

and Robert Lucas on growth. You can subscribe to Econ Talk at iTunes and elsewhere,

and you can visit our homepage econtalk.org to find readings related to our podcasts

in a full archive of earlier shows. Please keep in touch over the holiday break with your comments

and suggestions. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. My guest today is Pete Betke,

my colleague here at George Mason, and one of the foremost Austrian economists in the country,

with a wide ranging set of interests and research on philosophy and economics. Our topic for today

is the economics of crisis, how governments and individuals respond to events like Katrina.

Pete, welcome to Econ Talk. Before we get started on the economics of crisis,

tell us what is an Austrian economist? I think some of our listeners know what that is,

but I think some of them probably have an impression that it's somebody from Austria,

which of course it can be, but it's more than that. Yeah, the Austrian School of Economics

was founded in the late 19th century. It was given its name by its enemies. Its intellectual

enemies has happened a lot with schools of thought, and it came to the English-speaking world in the

1930s and then in the 1940s, first in the United Kingdom, through the influence of Lionel Robbins

and then bringing F.A. Hayek to the London School of Economics, and then Ludwig von Mises came

to the United States in 1940 and started teaching at NYU in the mid-1940s, and his students

...