Jeff Riggenbach

Jeff Riggenbach (born January 12, 1947) is an American libertarian journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and podcaster.

Educated at the University of Houston and California State University, Dominguez Hills, Riggenbach began working in journalism and broadcasting while still a student. Over a period of nearly thirty years (1966-1995), he worked in classical and all-news radio in Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as a writer, anchor, producer, and book and music critic;

contributed articles and reviews to numerous daily newspapers, including The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Washington Times; held staff writing positions on two of California's largest dailies, the Oakland Tribune and the Orange County Register; served as executive editor of the Libertarian Review and as managing editor of the Pacific Business Review; put in two years as the daily economics commentator for CNN Radio; and served as a contributing editor of several magazines, including Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty.

Throughout the 1980s, he produced the nationally syndicated daily radio programs "Byline" (well known as the radio home during the '80s of Nicholas Von Hoffman, Nat Hentoff, Michael Kinsley, Julian Bond, Howard Jarvis, and U.S. Senator William Proxmire) and "Perspective on the Economy." Since the dawn of the new century, he has written increasingly for publication on the Internet, most notably on LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, RationalReview.com, and Mises.org.He has long been associated with various libertarian think tanks and foundations, creating, managing, or working on special projects for the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Center for Independent Thought, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, among others. In 2005 he was named a senior fellow of the Randolph Bourne Institute, the parent nonprofit of the popular website, AntiWar.com.

Riggenbach's first book, In Praise of Decadence (1998), argued that the baby boomers turned out to be far more libertarian in their personal philosophy than had been expected. His second book, Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), argued that political events and trends in late 20th Century America had led to a rebirth of popular interest in revisionist accounts of American history. His third book, Persuaded by Reason: Joan Kennedy Taylor & the Rebirth of American Individualism (2014), combines an historical survey of American individualism with a detailed biographical profile of one of its largely unsung but enormously influential figures.

Though his long and varied career in radio broadcasting came to an end along with the 20th Century (his last gig, as an associate producer and on-air book reviewer for the then-popular weekly public radio program "Beyond Computers," ended in the fall of 2000) he has since turned the skills he developed in radio to use in narrowcasting. He has become a leading narrator of audio books on political, economic, and historical subjects for a number of producing organizations and audio publishers, most notably Blackstone Audio, University Press Audiobooks, the Tenth Amendment Center, and Audible.com. He has also established a reputation as a podcaster. His popular "Libertarian Tradition" podcast was updated weekly on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website in 2010 and 2011 and lives on in the archives available at Mises.org and YouTube.com. His "Kranky Notions" podcast has been updated monthly on Liberty.me (and YouTube.com) since September 2014.