We live in a world of euphemism. Undertakers have become “morticians,” press agents are now “public relations counselors” and janitors have all been transformed into “superintendents.” In every walk of life, plain facts have been wrapped in cloudy camouflage. No less has this been true of economics. In the old days, we used to suffer nearly
Originally published in Inquiry , July 1982. With every passing year, as memories of the Vietnam War fade from our nation’s historical consciousness, the calls for America to reassert itself in the world arena grow more insistent. A proliferation of national-security think tanks and conservative publicists issue daily proclamations that all the
November 11 (Veteran’s Day) in the US was once known as Armistice Day, the day set aside to celebrate the end of the modern era’s bloodiest war (up to that time). In his essay “ World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” Murray Rothbard discusses the war as the triumph of several Progressive intellectual strains from the late 19th
[First published in Inquiry , November 12, 1979.] A half-century ago, America — and then the world — was rocked by a mighty stock-market crash that soon turned into the steepest and longest-lasting depression of all time. It was not only the sharpness and depth of the depression that stunned the world and changed the face of modern history: it was
Following the Crash in 1987, many myths circulated about the nature, causes, and remedies for the crash at the time. Rothbard’s debunking of many of these myths is still informative today. Originally published in the January 1988 issue of The Free Market : Ever since Black, or Meltdown, Monday October 19th, the public has been deluged with
A selection from Chapter 42 of Economic Controversies . Why, then, does the business cycle recur? Why does the next boom-and-bust cycle always begin? To answer that, we have to understand the motivations of the banks and the government. The commercial banks live and profit by expanding credit and by creating a new money supply; so they 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.