Editor’s note: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Richard Thaler has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For a sense of Thaler’s views on government interventions in the marketplace, we have posted below David Gordon’s 2008 review of one of Thaler’s more well-known books. [ Nudge: Improving
Nietzsche’s Great Politics . By Hugo Drochon. Princeton University Press, 2016. xv + 200 pages. In the nineteenth century, most classical liberals believed that the state had to provide protective services. Gustave de Molinari disagreed; in The Production of Security (1849), he argued that private companies could provide these services. But few
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 4 (Winter 2016) Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016 Cohen and DeLong are well-known economists, but they indict their fellow economists for an overemphasis on theory. Away with models that have little relation to reality, our authors say. Instead,
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 91st birthday. It’s impossible to convey fully what he was like to those who did not know him; but here are a couple of stories about my unforgettable mentor and friend. In the fall of 1979, Murray gave a talk on the origins of World War II. He was not a specialist in European diplomatic history, but in his
If asked to name the foremost critic of Marxism, most economists sympathetic to the free market would name Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who in his treatise Capital and Interest and his separate brochure Karl Marx and the Close of His System demolished the labor theory of value, the linchpin of Marxist economics. But the labor theory is but one part of
Today is the eighth anniversary of the death of Burt Blumert. It’s still hard for me to believe that Burt isn’t here anymore. Burt was the person you could always go to if you faced a difficult situation. His insights and good humor made you understand exactly what you needed to do. To get some idea of what Burt was like, I recommend his
Today is the 82 nd birthday of Butler Shaffer, one of the great pioneers of the libertarian movement. Butler taught at the Freedom School of Robert LeFevre and, until his recent retirement, he was Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. He is an outstanding legal theorist and historian. In Boundaries of Order , he shows how
As Murray Rothbard often emphasized, the free market and a peaceful foreign policy are indispensable partners. We cannot maintain a free market if the government engages in a bellicose foreign policy. A powerful and aggressive state constantly engaged in war requires vast resources to sustain it, and “military socialism” is an all-too-present
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. One can be sure, then, that his new comprehensive book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan , reflects an Establishment point of view. As if this were not enough to tell us where the book is coming
Today is the 22 nd anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s death. His influence continues to grow, as new generations of students, at the Mises Institute and elsewhere, discover his thought. Many besides Rothbard’s acknowledged followers have been influenced by him, but one striking example must here suffice. One of the most important books of
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.