The Free Market 14, no. 6 (March 1996) In 1984, at a Mises Institute conference in Houston, some of us met O.P. Alford, III, for the first time. He was a quiet gentleman dressed in unassuming khaki trousers and shirt. His intelligence was evident and his manners were strikingly aristocratic. Those who visited with him that weekend noticed
The Free Market 14, no. 6 (June 1996) “Every great statesman must necessarily fail,” wrote Andrew Lytle in a moving tribute to John C. Calhoun. The reason: the statesman is driven by high ideals like freedom, self-government, justice, and constitutionalism, which will never be perfectly realized. Yet even in failure, the statesman preserves
The Free Market 17, no. 3 (March 1999) In this year of Millennium Lists (”Best Ten Songs of the Millennium,” etc.), the Wall Street Journal tried its hand at the ten economists--whom it called the “best and brightest”--who have “made a difference” in the last thousand years. Of course, the big problem in twentieth-century intellectual history is
The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) “The trouble with socialism,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “is that it takes too many evenings.” Indeed, the private lives of socialists are highly politicized. They must not be interested in anything-not even their families-other than socialism. The theory must inform every aspect of their lives, which must
JEFF DEIST: One issue discussed recently at our Supporters Summit is whether we’re winning or losing. So two questions: Who is “we,” and are we winning? LEW ROCKWELL: Well, the “we,” fundamentally, is everybody who believes in civilization, who is opposed to what’s been going on ever since the French Revolution, when the Left came to total power
“On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.” Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty.
The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. If you want to know where American supporters of free markets learned economics, take a look at Economics in One Lesson by Henry
The Free Market 21, no.4 (April 2003) Lecturing at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950, F.A. Hayek was nicely positioned to counter the rising influence of J.M. Keynes. Keynes’s new vision of macroeconomics was a resurrection of old fallacies but with a modern twist: an open call for a consolidated state to manage investment. More
The Free Market 24, no. 12 (December 2004) H ans F. Sennholz, winner of the 2004 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty, is one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival. He did so with eloquence, precision, and brilliance. He has never tired
The Free Market 26, no. 7 (July 2005) The 20th century was a time when the world sang the praises of despots and despotism. The more wars government leaders fought, the more they centralized their control, the more they hobbled the economy, the more liberty they stole, the more they cut off trade and exchange with other nations, the more their
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.