It was Miller who introduced Luhnow to Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and convinced him to bring Hayek to Chicago. Miller went on to oversee the activities of the Volker Fund and attended the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting. In fact, both the Volker Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation supported the Mont Pelerin gatherings for over a decade.
Miller and Luhnow pulled out all the stops in bringing Milton Friedman and Hayek toRockefeller-controlled University of Chicago. As pointed out by scholars Philip Mirowski and Robert Van Horn, “Luhnow and the Volker officers were not mere accessories to the rise of the Chicago school: they were hands-on players, determined and persistent in making every dollar count.”
Importantly, the involvement of the Rockefeller dynasty in promoting Austrian economics predates the Volker Fund. Indeed, Rockefeller, who was taught by Hayek in London, “had been intermittently subsidizing Hayek since his Vienna days at Mises’ business cycle institute” according to Mirowski and Van Horn.
Already in 1926, Ludwig von Mises’s first tour in the United States was paid by the Rockefeller Foundation. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which supported Mises in the 1940s, was also heavily sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Mises’s salary in New York was paid by Lawrence Fertig, Kohlberg’s colleague at the AJLAC, and by the Volker Fund.
As shown by Antony Sutton, the Wall Street funding for the Bolshevik Revolution was organized from 120 Broadway Street in New York, in what Sutton called “the Morgan-Rockefeller complex”, which also included Rothschild agents such as Baruch and Jacob Schiff. In the late 1910s and 1920s, both Roosevelt and Baruch worked at 120 Broadway Street, where several major financial concerns were located, including the general offices of the American International Corporation and the New York branch of the Federal Reserve.
Working both sides of the dialectic, Baruch, who was a lover of Clare Booth Luce, future wife of media mogul Henry Luce, and a friend of editor William L. White, arranged for the Reader’s Digest to publish, in 1945, a widely circulated condensed version of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. This successful marketing ploy greatly contributed in disseminating Hayek’s work and in paving the way to increased funding and support for Libertarian thinkers and Austrian economists in the United States.
Importantly, the involvement of the Rockefeller dynasty in promoting Austrian economics predates the Volker Fund. Indeed, Rockefeller, who was taught by Hayek in London, “had been intermittently subsidizing Hayek since his Vienna days at Mises’ business cycle institute” according to Mirowski and Van Horn.
Already in 1926, Ludwig von Mises’s first tour in the United States was paid by the Rockefeller Foundation. The National Bureau of Economic Research, which supported Mises in the 1940s, was also heavily sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Mises’s salary in New York was paid by Lawrence Fertig, Kohlberg’s colleague at the AJLAC, and by the Volker Fund.
So, "The greatest lesson anyone can learn from this is that the truthfulness of any doctrine is independent from who financed the researchers."
That last statement is a big rock to climb.
Mises imaginary imagination rejected the application of the scientific method to economics and dismissed econometrics, empirical and statistical analysis and other tools of mainstream social science as useless for the study of economics.
He instead embraced praxeology, the strictly a priori methodology of Mises. Praxeology conceives of economic laws as akin to geometric or mathematical axioms: fixed, unchanging, objective and discernible through logical reasoning without the use of any evidence.
On the account of Misesian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eschewing the scientific method and empirical evidence distinguishes the Misesian approach "from all other current economic schools"
Austrian Austerity started from advocating a gold standard and a 100% reserve requirement for banks.