The Economist reported on August 14, 2023, that “Argentina could get its first libertarian president .” They added that Javier Milei, the winner of Argentina’s election primary was, imagine this, a “free-market radical.” The problem, as I see it, is that few people actually know what a libertarian is, just like few people in America who call
Most contemporary political philosophers view free market capitalism with suspicion, if not outright loathing, but one exception is Gerald Gaus, who taught for many years at the University of Arizona. Gaus was by no means a Rothbardian but rather worked within the framework of “public reason” set forward by John Rawls, though Gaus greatly modified
How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity: A Metamodern Economic Reform Proposal by Justin Carmien Manticore Press, 2022; 272 pp. Neither I nor Justin Carmien, the author of How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity , is an economist. Carmien’s book, however, is not a work of economics but a philosophical attempt to apply Heideggerian metaphysics to
On we go, further and further into the era of post-journalism, where outlets survive not on the accuracy and honesty of their reporting but on the appeal of their narrative. —Fred Skulthorp, The Critic Nobody has missed that the West suffers from a credibility problem. Its institutions—by which we mean the media, government officials, academia,
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. In my column last week, I said that Senator Josh Hawley’s book The Tyranny of Big Tech raises important issues, and I’d like this week to go into one of these. He notes that Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search have immense influence on the news and political opinions
On March 2, 1966, Murray N. Rothbard, the founder and twenty-year editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies , would have celebrated his seventieth birthday. This issue of the JLS , as well as a simultaneously appearing special issue of its sister publication, the Review of Austrian Economics , likewise founded and edited by Rothbard, is a
Tibor Machan’s Ayn Rand aims to provide an introduction to Ayn Rand’s thought for “a broader readership who may have heard of Rand but not examined her ideas in detail.” He portrays himself as an admirer, but not as a true believer who supposes that Rand can think no wrong. In addition to sympatheically discussing her views, he tries also to
Unfortunately, this oldest and most general result of the theory of social phenomena [viz., the spontaneous coordination of individual efforts] has never been given a title which would secure it an adequate and permanent place in our thinking. The limitations of language make it almost impossible to state it without using misleading metaphorical
In Human Action , Mises anticipates an issue that has been at the heart of political philosophy for the past thirty years or so. The discussion in political philosophy has centered on issues raised by John Rawls in Political Liberalism (1993). Rawls says that in modern nation-states, individuals and groups have different “conceptions of the good.”
When justifying the airing of opinion, particularly of unpopular opinion, interlocutors have often pointed to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for support. Mill’s classical liberal tome is regarded as one of the greatest defenses of individuality, free thought, and free speech ever written. Raised by the free market economist and utilitarian James
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.