The Free Market 25, no. 4 (April 2007) Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. This article, which appeared in National Review in 1959, is the introduction to the new Mises Institute edition of Hazlitt’s Failure of the “New Economics.“ For most people, economics has ever been the “dismal science,” to be passed over
“I can see a day when economics will be taught as human action—including every subject that those words imply—and not broken up into courses that produce mathematicians instead of economists.” Margit von Mises died on June 25, just a week short of her 103rd birthday. While physically frail the last few years, Margit remained mentally alert until a
“To suppose all consumers to be dupes, and all merchants and manufacturers to be cheats, has the effect of authorizing them to be so, and of degrading all the working members of the community.” Anne Robert Jacques Turgot’s career in economics was brief but brilliant, and in every way remarkable. In the first place, he died rather young, and
One of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises, in the course of a long and highly productive life, developed an integrated, deductive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals. Even though his economic analysis
[Keynote Address to the Libertarian Party Convention, 1977] I am honored and delighted to be here, and particularly happy that the theme of this convention is Turning Point, 1777/1977. For one thing, it means that the Libertarian Party is, to my knowledge, the only organization in the country that realizes that the Bicentennial does not merely
[First published in Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought , 1967.] It was almost twenty years ago that I first met Frank Chodorov. It was at one of those luxurious but terribly dreary cocktail parties that have long served as rallying ground for the intelligentsia of the American right wing. There the more articulate of the rightists are
The Just Tax and the Just Price Costs of Collection, Convenience, and Certainty Distribution of the Tax Burden Uniformity of Treatment Equality Before the Law: Tax Exemption The Impossibility of Uniformity The “Ability-To-Pay” Principle The Ambiguity of the Concept The Justice of the Standard “Distribution of the Tax Burden,” continued Sacrifice
This unsigned editorial, written by Murray N. Rothbard, appeared in the April 15, 1969 issue of The Libertarian (soon to become The Libertarian Forum ). April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself. The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that
[This article is excerpted from chapter 14 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this article in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download .] We have now established each man’s property right in his own person and in the virgin land that he finds and transforms by his labor, and we have shown that
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.