On the rare occasions when governments consider curbing their expenditure on some service — or, more likely, consider curbing the rate of increase in spending — they are invariably called upon to undertake discussions with relevant “stakeholders” and members of the community. This process is ostensibly undertaken to determine the views of those
There was a time when the advocates of socialism argued that it would lead man to material abundance, whereas free-market capitalism would lead only to increasing misery and would ultimately collapse under its own internal stresses. You don’t hear that too much these days, and for good reason. A century of empirical evidence has shown the
With the almost constant statist apologetics we hear from many government and academic economists it is hard to believe that the discipline of economics was once a thorn in the side of the state and its political elite. So commonplace are fallacious economic arguments advocating state control that it sometimes seems that refutation of all of
While already deeply entrenched in government decision-making, [1] consultation and submission to the interests of various “stakeholders” is also becoming more and more common in the business world under the influence of the doctrine of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Weary of the relentless pursuit of profit and the daunting task of
Modern “liberals” who advocate the view that government should provide us with the necessities or alleged necessities of life rarely appreciate that this assistance rests on a system of mass robbery and enslavement that is highly inimical to their professed belief in liberty. In fact, the advocates of such policies present them in quite the
It is well known that the libertarian political philosophy is antagonistic to coercively imposed rules that limit people’s freedom to use their private property as they see fit. Indeed, the very essence of libertarianism is the nonaggression principle that condemns the initiation of force against person or property. As a result, libertarians have
“The alleged right to freedom from discrimination is, on close examination, merely a means to allow the use of force to prevent people from using all available information in their judgments of others.” One of the most effective ways to destroy a concept is through the process of conceptual inflation: First, expand the ambit of the concept to
Recently, a friend of mine complained about a spate of burglaries that had occurred near her newly bought home. A house down the street from hers had been burgled in the weeks before, and her next-door neighbor had been burgled not long afterward. In the latter case, the thieves had made off with a large-screen plasma television set and a laptop
These days, explicit arguments in favor of fascism and the ideology of unlimited state power are, how shall I put this, ineffective at convincing the masses. Though people still adore the fascist ideology of the boundless power of the state and its fusion of public and private business, this is only so long as it is not given its proper name.
Comedian Chris Rock has a routine where he says, You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.