Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory. For, fundamentally, economics does not deal with things or material objects. Economics analyzes the logical attributes and consequences of the existence of individual valuations. “Things” enter into the picture, of course, since there can be no valuation without things to be valued. But the
Murray Rothbard’s greatest contribution to the politics of freedom is back in print. Following up on Mises’s demonstration that a society without private property degenerates into economic chaos, Rothbard shows that every interference with property represents a violent and unethical invasion that diminishes liberty and prosperity. First published
Scientism and Values , Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds . (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand ), 1960; The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar , 1997), pp .
The flat tax draws virtually unanimous support from the “right-thinking” intellectuals in our society, including academics, writers, and media pundits—all people who have managed successfully to identify their own views, whatever they may be, with the general welfare. Any policy that draws unanimous support from these people can’t be all good.
Editors note: On Aug. 8, 1957, Murray N. Rothbard wrote to Richard C. Cornuelle of the Volker Fund, strongly recommending Emil Kauder’s reseaches into the Aristotelian background of marginal utility and Austrian economic theory (Rothbard Papers). In a memo of February 1957, “Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism,” reproduced below, Rothbard
In this unpublished memo to the Volcker Fund in May 1960, Rothbard discusses some of the enormous differences among Catholics on political and economic questions: Catholics can be found who are left-wing anarchists, socialists, middle-of-the-roaders, fascists, and ardent free-enterprisers and individualists. Furthermore, even on such strict
The Freeman September and October 1995. Direct exchange of goods and services, also known as “barter,” is hopelessly unproductive beyond the most primitive level, and indeed every “primitive” tribe soon found its way to the discovery of the tremendous benefits of arriving, on the market, at one particularly marketable commodity, one in general
The modern American Right began, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as a reaction against the New Deal and the Roosevelt Revolution, and specifically as an opposition to the critical increase of statism and state intervention at home, and to war and state intervention abroad. The guiding motif of what we might call the “old American Right” was a deep and
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.