In several countries, allowing for some positive bias in popular inflation measures, zero inflation itself is now close to being the status quo. That is a great accomplishment in its own right. But its full benefits will not be grasped unless we...
Teacher’s Manual available here. Lessons for the Young Economist is easily the best introduction to economics for the young reader—because it covers both pure economic theory and also how markets work (the domain of most introductory books).T...
Leonard E. Read discusses the importance of freedom as a foundation for finding the answers to the problems induced by central planning and “master minding”. He suggests: “Freedom has come by accident, the result of desperation rather than a...
Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) is the American individualist anarchist and legal theorist known mainly for setting up a commercial post office in competition with the government and thereby being shut down. But he was also the author of some of...
J.B. Say battled the prophet of doom in this rare series of letters that explain how economic growth occurs without destabilizing economic forces. He writes with passion and personality, anticipating so many Austrian insights. An extra treat in...
This is Mises’s classic statement in defense of a free society, one of the last statements of the old liberal school and a text from which we can continue to learn. It has been the conscience of a global movement for liberty for 80 years. This...
The German edition of Mises’s classic Liberalism. The program of liberalism... if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production... All the other demands of liberalism result...
A student and colleague of Murray N. Rothbard, Hoppe combines the Austrian School of economics, Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law, and a foreign policy of non-intervention into a systematic defense of human freedom.
Political philosophy is dominated by a myth, the myth of the necessity of the state. The state is considered necessary for the provision of many things, but primarily for peace and security. Gerard Casey argues that social order can be...
The drive for liberty, whether from the left or right, is the underlying impulse. This book tells you where it is all headed and why. It might seem easy to write an overview of libertarianism. If so, why do so many attempts fall short? They...
In 1958, the Mont Pelerin Society was entering a difficult period in which its intellectual lights were drifting away from liberalism of the old school. Ludwig von Mises used his speech that year to explain why this was a terrible trend. He didn...
In 1913, Charles T. Sprading (1871-1959) wrote a book of remarkable prescience that anticipated the systematic development of an American libertarian tradition. He called it Liberty and the Great Libertarians. What he provided was a biography...
Dr. Paul writes that to believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It...
Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political...
From the introduction: Advancing social ideas that do not demand obedience or compliance requires far more personal patience than simply forcing others to comply via the political ballot box. The widely held idea that dicta and force can serve a...
Bassani shows that Jefferson was a special kind of libertarian. He did not believe in government, but for one or two areas. Nor did he believe in the “union” much less the nation state. He was a radical individualist who had no use for the...
F.A. Harper was a leader in the libertarian movement from the 1950s and onward. Here is his early manifesto (1949), in which he reveals a sophisticated understanding of free markets and freedom but had not yet, as he later did, come around...
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.