The 20th century was a bleak time for the cause of liberty. The Age of Liberalism was over. Nobody wanted to hear the ideas of Jefferson, Cobden, and Bastiat anymore. Those who then called themselves “liberals” clamored for all-around planning: that is, the abolition of liberty. In America, the last echo of classical liberalism was the “Old
What was earth-shattering about the advent of economics, according to Ludwig von Mises, was its unprecedented discovery of regularity in the social realm. Just as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton had discovered that there were immutable laws that regulate the movements of physical bodies, the early economists discovered that there were immutable laws
[ Free Market , January 2012. You can subscribe by becoming a member .] “We are the 99%!” This slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protesters has been called the most memorable quote of the past year. Those who rally to its cry do so in opposition to the villainous 1%. For a handful of the protesters, being a member of the 1% means being a wealthy
Steven Horwitz has an essay up at Cato protesting that, contrary to common perception, “modern” Austrian economics is actually very empirical. Much of his argument stems from his treatment of economic history as being a subset of economics , in stark contrast to Mises’s position that There is economics and there is economic history. The two must
Another hurricane strikes, and, as always, it has been followed by another round of pundits proclaiming that it will boost the economy. The broken-window fallacy lives on. But with the lessons contained in the following resources, you can easily blow down the fundamentally flimsy arguments of the hurri-Keynesians. This short film, created by
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.