scholarium

Rahim Taghizadegan

Rahim Taghizadegan is the last Austrian economist of the Austrian School in the direct tradition, and was the first one to teach about Bitcoin at university. Author of fifteen books, he is the founder of scholarium, where the Austrian School can be studied in its original interdisciplinary form. Originally a nuclear physicist, he now focuses on investment and education, builds Bitcoin citadels, develops privacy-oriented tools on nostr and RGB, and is based in Zug, Switzerland.

Austrian School

As a student of Roland Baader (a student of Hayek) and Hans H. Hoppe (a student of Rothbard), Rahim Taghizadegan is in the direct tradition, but also learned from the last Viennese representatives of all the disciplines other than economics which constituted the interdiscplinary nature of the original tradition. He has been a lecturer at numerous universities, especially in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, is the author of the standard works Understanding Economics for Real and Everything You Need to Know About the Austrian School (both in German), has written two scholarly articles on the further development of praxeology, following suggestions by Mises and Rothbard, toward a “cratics” – a praxeology of violence, useful for (geo)political analysis. He studied at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, where some of the original members of Austrian School taught, and has been a lecturer for the Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama. Roland Baader, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and the Viennese salon host Rainer Ernst Schütz entrusted him with large parts of their libraries. Augmented with his own book collections, this formed the largest private library on the Austrian School and liberalism – the Roland Baader Library in the Alps near Vienna – and the most complete global library with first editions from the first four generations of the Austrian School – the Karl-Heinz-Muhr Library in the Alps near Kitzbühel.

Investment

As the author of the standard works Austrian School for Investors and The Zero Interest Trap, Rahim Taghizadegan has been speaking, lecturing and publishing on financial markets and wealth management since 2006. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Liechtenstein-based Incrementum Fund and has been consulting and speaking for institutions including Julius Bär, ZZ Vermögensverwaltung, Capitalbank, and DZ Bank Global Central Bank Conference. He is himself an active investor in many pioneering ventures all around the world.

Bitcoin

Rahim Taghizadegan has been the first academic economist to take Bitcoin seriously and understand its monetary theoretical background, the first to include it in university curricula, and author of the first economics book to mention Bitcoin. He has been an observer of Bitcoin since 2009, involved in teaching and publications on Bitcoin since 2011, and a regular speaker at international Bitcoin conferences since 2018. He has founded the company Citadel Networks which builds privacy-protecting tools based on nostr, RGB, and Liquid.

Technology

Rahim Taghizadegan first studied physics at TU Vienna and EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) with a specialization in nuclear physics and complex systems. He has worked in space research and has a deep knowledge of digital technologies (programming languages, LLMs, robotics, process automation)

Entrepreneurship

An Entrepreneur himself, Rahim Taghizadegan is the author of Heroes, Crooks, And Visionaries and Handbook of Entrepreneurial Ethics (both in German). He is an expert in geo-arbitrage, international entrepreneurship, and digitization. He is the mentor and business partner of Christoph Heuermann, a well-known advisor for digital nomads.

Geopolitics

Rahim Taghizadegan has been the founding president and chief economist of the Free Cities Foundation for the development of special economic zones. He frequently shares his deep knowledge on geopolitical issues and history as a public speaker, and has personal insights into the Middle East through family ties to Iran and Lebanon. With a special connection to the Alpine region, he is the author of The Alpine Philosophy (in German), a book presenting the unique cultural and historical background of this region. His besteller Vom Systemtrottel zum Wutbürger inspired Austria’s most successful actor, Roland Düringer, to give his much-noted speech on television on the lack of political reform. In his youth, Rahim Taghizadegan has worked in journalism and politics and learned about EU institutions in Brussels. He is fluent in five languages and has travelled most parts of the world.

Education

Rahim Taghizadegan has been an educational entrepreneur for 15 years and active in education for almost 30 years. He has had teaching positions at dozens of universities, and is an expert on the history of education and alternative education. An advocate for unschooling, he develops alternative educational locations all around the world, and consults schools, educational enterprises and universities.

Rahim Taghizadegan has personally known and learned from:

  • Roland Baader, entrepreneur and student of F.A. Hayek
  • Hans H. Hoppe, professor and student of M.N. Rothbard
  • Israel M. Kirzner, student of Ludwig von Mises
  • Vernon M. Smith, Nobel laureate in economics
  • James Buchanan, Nobel laureate in economics
  • Antal Fekete, contrarian Austro-Hungarian economist of the Austrian School
  • Anthony de Jasay, philosopher in the tradition of F.A. von Hayek
  • Peter Pühringer, investor and philanthropist
  • Rainer Ernst Schütz, host of the last classical liberal salon of Vienna
  • Herbert B. Schmidt, follower of Ludwig Erhard and economic advisor of post-Soviet Estonia
  • Karl Hermann Spitzy, last representative of the Vienna School of medicine
  • Erhard Oeser, collaborator of Konrad Lorenz und student of Karl Popper
  • Franz M. Wuketits, Austrian biologist and pioneer of evolutionary epistemology
  • Harald Mori, student and collaborator Viktor Frankl
  • Helmut Rauch, nuclear physicist, teacher of Nobel laureate Anton Zeinlinger
  • Karl Socher, student of Hans Mayer and Gottfried Haberler
  • Wolfang Somary, son of Felix Somary
  • Lawrence Hayek, son of F. A. von Hayek