Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Former president Donald Trump has been impeached for “incitement to insurrection.” The House Democrats’ claim is that Trump made an inflammatory speech which—a week later—led to the Capitol riot of January 6. The Senate is now considering whether or not to convict Trump of this “crime.” I
I’d like to discuss today an argument that is popular among some contemporary political philosophers. If this argument is correct, it undermines the sort of natural rights found in Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty. I hope that I am not spoiling the surprise by telling you immediately that I think the argument is wrong. Natural rights of the
Critics of the Chinese Communist regime often point toward the government’s social credit system , in which the government traces individuals’ electronic paths, from their comments on social media to items they purchase, and issues rewards and punishments based on the information collected. For example, a Chinese citizen who receives a “bad”
With President Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court, the usual suspects are weighing in with the usual rhetoric about the candidate. In nominating Jackson, who is black, Biden declared : I believe it’s time that we have a court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation with a nominee of
Remington Arms, America’s oldest gun manufacturer, settled for $73 million in a wrongful-death suit filed by the families of several victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Bushmaster, the company that actually manufactured the rifle used in the shooting, is owned by Remington Outdoor Company. The settlement followed seven-plus years of litigation ,
Max Weber, citing Leon Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk , bluntly stated that “every state is founded on violence.” The imaginative theories that have been at times employed to justify the state violence do not fall under the scope of this article. What is analyzed here is the orderly way in which the state elites have jointly prepared the ground to
Readers may recall Florida Senate Bill 7202 , regulating social media platforms, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis about a year ago. The stated intention of the legislation is to combat social media censorship. This bill had a slate of provisions, including: Prohibiting deplatforming of political candidates
In a forthcoming article at the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology , three law professors propose a novel, legal tort theory of liability. This liability is referred to as “reckless associations,” and it has the effect of allowing a victim to sue a third-party for assuming a leadership position in an association if a member of the association
It was the best of the laws, it was the worst of the laws, it was built on freedom, it was built on power, it was the spontaneous order of organic social institutions, it was the deliberate order of ideology and coercion, it was a stream of jurisprudence guiding us to justice, it was a tangle of statutes pushing us to restriction. In short, law,
The recent school shootings have led many people to want to restrict or deny altogether our right to own guns, and in these troubled times, it is all the more essential to bear in mind the reasons for that right. To that end, I’d like in this week’s column to discuss the excellent essay by the philosopher Lester H. Hunt “Guns and Self-Defense,”
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.