Price level

Inflation: Looking Beyond Aggregates

Mainstream economists define inflation as the increase in an imaginary “price level” that is relatively neutral in its effects. Austrian economists, however, know better, as they realize that the effects of inflating the money supply are anything but neutral.

Mises Wire Joe Chavez
A Real ID sign in Miami International Airport

Real ID Is Not About Keeping You Safe

With the deadline for obtaining the federal government's Real ID technically upon us, it’s important to understand that this is not an irritating but necessary program to keep Americans safe. It's the latest example of the government using 9/11 as an excuse to grab more power.

Mises Wire Connor O'Keeffe
Optimal tariff

The Fallacy of Optimal Tariffs

Mainstream economists have been obsessed with finding “optimal” tax rates, and Nicholas Kaldor‘s 1940 formalization of the “optimal” tariff is no exception. Austrian economists, however, know that there is no such thing as an “optimal” tax, given the harm taxation causes.

Justice

Understanding The Importance of Justice

When people speak of “social justice,” they are not speaking of justice in any historical form but rather an imaginary state of affairs in which the state enforces a progressive view of equality. F.A. Hayek wrote that “social justice” is “wholly devoid of meaning or content.”
Wanjiru Njoya
Trade balance

US Trade Account Balance and the Imposition of Tariffs

Although politicians, pundits, and the media claim that a trade deficit is harmful to a country, the reality is much different. In a free economy, individuals interact with each other in mutually-beneficial exchanges. As Murray Rothbard noted, free exchanges do not produce winners and losers.
Frank Shostak
Sovereignty

Reclaiming Our Sovereignty from State Power

Have Americans forgotten how to be free? When warfare erupted between American colonists and the British government, the colonists believed that they had God-given rights that protected them against state power. Would that Americans today believed the same thing.
George Ford Smith
Global trade

A Moral Argument for Free Trade

Murray Rothbard believed that the right to engage in voluntary exchange has long been understood as a natural right, not just a good, practical idea. Tariffs and other trade barriers violate that right.
Matthew Williams
The Misesian
Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State” introduces the state as a unique, coercive institution, distinct from society. The latest Misesian expands on this view, examining historical commentary on the state’s emergence and its central role in modernity.
Auburn, AL

Research Fellowships at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, are available to graduate students and post-docs interested in scientific research in the Austrian school and libertarian political economy.

Virtual

In May 2025, the Mises Institute will hold its next Mises Book Club, a program that promotes deep reading in Austrian economics.

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Auburn, AL

The Rothbard Graduate Seminar provides an intense study of Misesian and Rothbardian economic analysis, along with the substantive conclusions of that research in related fields.

Economics for Beginners

Our Complex World

Complexity: Liberty vs. Power

Can we find freedom and opportunity in an uncertain future? This series explores the complex systems that shape our world.
The Costs of the Progressives

Progressivism

The battle between American individualism and modern progressive collectivism.
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.

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Mises Institute