Mises University, the Mises Institute’s week-long summer program, ended last Saturday night. I attended this program as a student 20 years ago. It got me started in Austrian economics. There would very likely not have been a Meltdown had I not attended.

I’ve already linked to my opening remarks at this year’s event.

The rest of the week was as exciting as always, with an added bonus: Judge Andrew Napolitano joined us for a seminar on constitutional law. His sessions were open only to those students who had been accepted into his program, and (at the Judge’s request) were not recorded. I have quite a lot of work these days, so I had to spend some of the time in my office (for instance, I was readying a chapter in a forthcoming book of essays by various scholars looking back on the Fed’s performance, with this being its 100th anniversary). After one of the Judge’s sessions, Bob Murphy asked if I had attended any yet. Not yet, I said, but I was planning to. I had to go, Bob said. I had to see the Judge’s command of the material and of the audience. And he was right: the Judge is even more impressive than I realized. Those students got a special treat.

The Judge sat with the students at lunch:

During Monday night’s “Evening with Tom Woods,” I decided this year to showcase other Mises Institute people. I did little interviews with Patrick Newman, the Rutgers graduate and soon-to-be-graduate-student who won the oral exam (first place in which carries a $2500 prize) last year. I spoke to the singer and guitarist for Fly-By Radio, the great (and Misesian!) band that has performed for Mises students for the past three years. And I had students pose questions for Walter Block, who in addition to his work in economics is something of an expert in dealing with weird, difficult, or just plain off-the-wall objections.

I’ve likewise posted the chess game I played against Walter Block, whom I have played officially every year for three years now.

I had a chance to play against Pobo Efekoro, whose Brooklyn chess team is the subject of the documentary (coming to PBS this fall, and available on Amazon now) Brooklyn Castle. Didn’t beat him once. But learned quite a bit, and at the very end I actually gave him a real game — and then blundered it away.

Then, in addition to the plenary lectures and concurrent sessions, we had panels on history and policy (my panel), and on theory.

Finally, watch Bob Higgs’ challenging closing remarks:

Interested in Austrian economics? Check out my resource page: LearnAustrianEconomics.com.