Editor Note: This completes a two-part interview of Professor Jack High, profiled yesterday. His interest in business scholarship in the classical-liberal tradition relates to important topics at MasterResource: political capitalism, contra-capitalism, and corporate cronyism.

“There is so much about business practice that is ripe for study by Austrian economics, but it is not a main focus of our present generation of scholars….. I suspect that the study of business practice is an opportunity for enterprising Austrian scholars to make a mark.” (Jack High, below)

Part III: Austrian Economics and Business History

Q. Let’s step back and talk about business history. How did Austrian (or market process) economics overlap with the study of business?

A. Austrian economics from the beginning has realized that market activity is characterized by desire for improvement, and that change is initiated and carried out by the vital few, to use Jonathon Hughes’ term.…

Editor Note: Jack High, retired from a professorship in economics at George Mason University, came to specialize in political economy, particularly business lobbying (rent-seeking) for special government favor. In this regard, he edited Regulation: Economic Theory and History (University of Michigan Press: 1991) and wrote (with Clayton Coppin) The Politics of Purity (University of Michigan Press: 1999). This interview discusses this interest given the resurgence of themes relating to political capitalism , contra-capitalism, and corporate cronyism, important themes at MasterResource.

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Part I: Discovering, Teaching Market-Process Economics

Q. Jack, just to (re)introduce you to readers, tell us a bit about how you became an academic economist and came to embrace Austrian School’ or ‘market process’ economics.

A. In the late 1960s I read two books, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and Capitalism the Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand, that piqued my interest in economics.…