Roepke Rather Than Rand

Roepke (via http://joeljmiller.com)

Over the past few years, more and more conservatives/libertarians have "discovered" Ayn Rand. But, as Joel J. Miller writes, "libertarians and conservatives — particularly those who confess Christian faith — should be wary of adopting Ayn Rand as their own lest they find themselves in the position of the man in Aesop’s story who took the snake to his bosom."

Miller is the the vice president of editorial and acquisitions for the nonfiction division at Thomas Nelson Publishers.

I was pleased to find that Miller has joined the small but growing group of admirers of the late Wilhelm Roepke.

In the blog post What if we dumped Rand for Roepke?, Miller has this to say about Roepke...

Capitalism has had many defenders. Some, rather than being anti-religious like Rand, are self-consciously Christian. Rand’s contemporary, Wilhelm Roepke, is one such example. Looking back at the tremendous upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, many responded by embracing socialism, both in Europe and even America. Not Roepke. A professional economist, he lectured, wrote several books, and was partly responsible for engineering Germany’s post-WWII recovery. One of his books, published one year after Atlas Shrugged hit the market, remains essential reading today.

That book is A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market.

Because I'm also an admirer of Wilhelm Roepke, I've created this page on the website with links to several articles and books by Roepke and about Roepke.