George Reisman Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
George Reisman was born on January 13, 1937, in New York City, and came of age in an environment where commerce, immigration, and American upward mobility were everyday realities. Those surroundings fed an early curiosity about how markets function and how prosperity is created. He pursued that curiosity in formal study at New York University, where he completed graduate work in economics and attended the famous private seminar of Ludwig von Mises. The seminar, a gathering place for analytically minded free-market thinkers in mid-20th-century New York, grounded Reisman in the Austrian School tradition and exposed him to vigorous debate on money, prices, and the place of entrepreneurship in a free society.

Mentors and Intellectual Formation
Ludwig von Mises was the central mentor in Reisman's formation. Through Mises's Human Action and the seminar discussions, Reisman absorbed a methodological individualism and a rigorous defense of rational economic calculation under capitalism. He also became deeply influenced by the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, whose defense of reason, egoism, and individual rights helped shape his philosophical framework for economics. Rand's emphasis on the moral legitimacy of productive achievement resonated with his reading of classical and Austrian economics. He also admired the journalism and clarity of Henry Hazlitt, whose writing reinforced the discipline of tracing economic consequences beyond the immediate and the seen. These figures gave Reisman a distinctive platform: an integration of economic theory with an explicitly moral defense of capitalism.

Academic Career
Reisman embarked on an academic path that balanced teaching with long-form scholarship. He joined Pepperdine University in Southern California, where he taught for many years and eventually became Professor Emeritus of Economics. In the classroom he was known for close textual work with students on the classics of economic thought and for systematic expositions of price formation, profit and interest, capital accumulation, and the determinants of real wages. His courses often challenged received Keynesian doctrines and emphasized the long-run, aggregate benefits of saving and investment to labor. Outside the classroom he delivered lectures at conferences and seminars devoted to classical liberalism and the Austrian tradition, cultivating a reputation as an exacting but generous explainer of complex ideas.

Major Works and Ideas
Reisman's early book The Government Against the Economy offered a robust critique of interventions such as price controls, inflationary finance, and regulation, arguing that they undermine coordination and erode living standards. His magnum opus, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, synthesizes classical and Austrian insights in a single, comprehensive framework. The treatise seeks to reconcile the subjective theory of value with the classical interest in costs and distribution, defending profits as an indispensable coordinating signal and a reward for risk-bearing and foresight. It presents an elaborate account of capital accumulation as the central force behind rising productivity and real wages, rebuts exploitation doctrines by showing the mutual gains in voluntary exchange, and offers a sustained defense of Say's Law against underconsumptionist and Keynesian critiques. The work also explores environmental policy, monopoly, public finance, international trade, and the culture of entrepreneurship, always returning to the theme that the moral and material case for capitalism are mutually reinforcing.

Engagement with Objectivism and the Liberty Movement
Alongside his academic work, Reisman engaged with the Objectivist movement inspired by Ayn Rand. Through lectures, essays, and personal connections, he pressed the point that a science of economics benefits from a wider philosophical foundation grounded in reason and individual rights. In that milieu he worked closely with the psychotherapist and Objectivist intellectual Edith Packer, whom he married. Packer's clinical focus on rational psychology and her advocacy for a principled life of productive purpose complemented Reisman's economic arguments and helped shape the tone and method of their joint educational efforts. Reisman also interacted with leading figures who developed or debated Austrian ideas in the postwar era, including contemporaries who had studied with Mises. He was aware of, and sometimes at odds with, trends in libertarian and Objectivist circles, but maintained a consistent emphasis on the integration of economics with a moral defense of freedom. His contact with Leonard Peikoff, Rand's literary executor and a key interpreter of Objectivism, reflects this shared philosophical background even where differences emerged.

Teaching and Method
Reisman's pedagogy reflects a conviction that economics is both logical and historical. He favored clear definitions, careful chains of reasoning, and illustrative numerical examples, often drawing from household budgeting, business accounting, and the basic operations of a firm to show how individual decisions aggregate into macroeconomic outcomes. He insisted that the wages of labor depend on the supply of capital relative to the supply of labor and that the institutional framework of private property is the indispensable condition for sustained growth. He was equally emphatic in rejecting the idea that consumption-led demand is the engine of prosperity, arguing instead that production and saving drive expansion and that sound money and fiscal restraint protect the capital structure on which living standards depend.

Public Voice and Later Writings
Beyond his books, Reisman published essays that distilled his views for a wider audience. He wrote on inflation and monetary policy, on the economics of environmental regulation, and on antitrust, always returning to the predictable, if often unintended, consequences of coercive interference in markets. He criticized policies that penalize profits or capital formation and warned about the cultural costs of treating business success with suspicion. In later years he made his work broadly accessible, including releasing his major treatise in digital form, and continued to write reflections on contemporary policy debates using the theoretical apparatus he had refined over decades.

Personal Life
Reisman's partnership with Edith Packer was central to his life. Their marriage united complementary vocations: his in economic theory and policy, hers in psychology and applied ethics within the Objectivist tradition. They collaborated in educational ventures, public lectures, and editorial work, with Packer offering critical feedback that sharpened the clarity and organization of his arguments. Their home in Southern California became a base for teaching, writing, and discussion with students and colleagues who shared an interest in the moral and economic case for capitalism.

Legacy and Influence
George Reisman stands out for a disciplined effort to unify Austrian price theory, classical insights about capital and wages, and a philosophic defense of individual rights. Through the mentorship of Ludwig von Mises, the influence of Ayn Rand, and the intellectual companionship of Edith Packer, he developed a voice that is both analytic and unapologetically normative. His students, readers, and interlocutors have encountered in his work a comprehensive framework that links everyday business practice to large-scale social progress. As Professor Emeritus at Pepperdine University and as the author of a sweeping treatise, he helped preserve and extend a tradition of economic thought devoted to freedom, production, and the civilizational achievements of capitalism.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Freedom - Business - Money.