From the Introduction... The American notion [is] that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or prosperity, or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; [and] that the private individual should not feel the
David French, maybe National Review ’s most reliably wrong scribe, issued this gem in response to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence in Florida: Imagine thinking federal police agents and lawyers will be “held accountable,” or that presidents are not above the law! Is this an afterschool special? “Let’s wait and see, folks, before we judge
What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill Basic Books, 2022; 333 pp. William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took
Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is not only a best-selling author but also a top advisor to Klaus Schwab, founder and front man of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2018, Harari wrote : “Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.” And, in a 2019
Lord Acton was one of the greatest classical liberal historians of the nineteenth century, but his view of the War between the States has in some circles occasioned dismay. Acton, in a letter of 1866 to Robert E. Lee, said , “I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake
This year is the fortieth anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty , and although many topics in it have attracted attention, several of them have been neglected. I’m going to discuss one of these in this week’s article. Isaiah Berlin was one of the most influential and important political philosophers in the years after World War
Persons have a natural right to go into business together, and they may do so either as a partnership or a corporation. In the latter type of organization, the persons setting it up limit their civil liability (I won’t be concerned in this article with the vast and complex issues raised by this). The people who set up a corporation are the owners,
Sometimes people wonder whether philosophy is of any use in understanding daily life. Aren’t philosophers “in wandering mazes lost”? Away with such nonsense, say some. Elaine Sternberg illustrates by her example that this view is wrong. In her excellent Economic Affairs article “ Defining Capitalism ,” she shows in convincing fashion that
In this week’s article, I’d like to discuss an aspect of Murray Rothbard’s criticism of Marxism that is often misunderstood. The topic is important not only for understanding the essay by Rothbard I’ll be discussing, “Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist,” but also for grasping a useful style of conceptual analysis of which Rothbard’s essay is a
Carl Schmitt has been classified in many different ways, but certainly never as a libertarian. To the contrary, Schmitt strongly supported a strong state and for a few years was a leading light among Nazi jurists, though he fell out of favor with the Nazi Party after 1936. In his great work Constitutional Theory (1928), he writes critically of the
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.