Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Many people think that a universal basic income (UBI) would be a good substitute for the welfare state. Under this proposal, each person resident in a country would receive a guaranteed income, sufficient to live at a modest level. People would get the money unconditionally. Unlike
“You are hitting the nail with too many hammers.” I can still remember Bob Clower, my dissertation chairman at the time, saying that to me after reading my most recent work. It was directed at the fact that I had shown problems with a particular competing argument “six ways from Sunday.” That is, It was overkill. Of course, he didn’t note that his
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The usual criticisms of critical race theory (CRT) have become patent and cliché by now. CRT essentializes race and those within races, figuring all white people as racist and all black people oppressed. It treats people not as individuals with individual motives and goals but strictly as
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Senator Josh Hawley’s just-published The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery, 2021) raises important issues. Hawley asks, for example, Do Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube censor views that that their managers do not like? It seems clear that the answer is yes. Many people who have tried to post
Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America? George F. Babbitt is novelist Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist in the novel of the same name. Babbitt is a real estate man, which is to say a salesman, but the newfangled 1920s term is “Realtor ™. “ Incurious, smug, self-satisfied, and utterly predictable, Babbitt is well pleased with his
Students often ask me to recommend a good introduction to philosophy, and now the question can be answered more easily than in years past. Michael Huemer’s Knowledge, Value, and Reality , published last April, contains a profusion of arguments on important topics and is written in a conversational style that is easy to follow, and is often very
Critical race theory (CRT) has become the cultural wedge issue of 2021. An important question is what will be CRT’s effect on the future of freedom. Because CRT assumes a finite economic pie and posits all economic interactions as zero-sum, the continuing adoption of CRT in American society will necessarily lead the US away from free markets and
Signs of incipient totalitarian impulses have been evident since the rise of political correctness. Yet, warnings from those who saw the character of contemporary “social justice” went largely unheeded. Nevertheless, even before degenerating into “wokeness,” social justice bore the seeds of civilizational decline and the simultaneous rise of
Over the past half decade, there has been a growing trend signaling a shift in the perceived and accepted role of science. It is not uncommon to see slogans and mottos such as “ the science is settled ” and “ believe in science .” Statements like this present two major problems: first, science is determined to be final and indisputable; second, it
This book offers an account of Hegel that will surprise many readers—at least it surprised me. The political philosopher Leo Strauss often criticized “historicism,” the view that human beings do not have a fixed nature or essence. Instead, as José Ortega y Gasset put it, “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is—history.” G.W.F. Hegel was one
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.