Acknowledgments

The starting point of this book was a series of recorded lectures, and that meant I needed quality transcripts of the lectures to begin work on the text. Assembling transcripts from lectures such as these is no easy task, however, and computer-generated transcripts simply did not provide the human touch necessary. After all, Raico’s lectures are filled with a variety of names, places, and obscure foreign-language phrases that don’t easily translate from the spoken word to the written word. Thankfully, transcriptionist Arlo Pignotti has saved me many hours of work by going the extra mile to make sure the early transcripts were not simply correct phonetically but included the correct spellings of names of theorists and historians from half a dozen foreign countries and languages.

I’d like to thank David Gordon for helping me track down some especially obscure source material and Judy Thommesen for providing essential editorial guidance and insight.

I must also note that this project would not have been possible without the encouragement and the many resources made available by Mises Institute president Tom DiLorenzo and by our founder Lew Rockwell.

Finally, I am grateful to my wife Jessica and our four children for giving me many reasons to care about the future. As Raico understood, if we want to make the future better, we must first learn about the past.

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