- Downloads:
- July August 2025 Misesian.pdf
Our great Senior Fellow Alex Pollock has pointed out that the reason Napoleon created the Bank of France was to make sure there was a bank that would always lend him money. Napoleon, of course, needed immense amounts of money because the French state was almost constantly at war during his reign. Having a central bank at his fingertips made it a lot easier for Napoleon to wage his wars on the rest of Europe.
Napoleon was a pioneer when it came to understanding and augmenting state power. He created what is recognizable today as perhaps the first modern national security state, with an economy and political system devoted overwhelmingly to war.
The Bank of France was crucial to all of this. At the center of any militaristic state are the institutions necessary to fund the state and its wars. This is as true today as it was two centuries ago. The power to tax, spend, regulate, and inflate is inseparable from the power to make war. Indeed, it is essentially impossible to discuss wars and foreign policy without considering the state’s extraction of resources from the domestic population.
In this issue of The Misesian, we take a look at how states use their fiscal and financial powers to convert the productivity and resources of the private sector into warmaking power for the state’s elites.
From the Editor—July/August 2025
Since 1945, the federal government has come to dominate the tech sector with seemingly endless contracts and grants paid for by American taxpayers. This has also created a new class of scientific experts who rely on government funding for much of their work.
War, Taxes, and the National Science Foundation
Scientists have been transformed into grant hunters, and that gives them lots of incentives to lobby for even more federal funding. So, scientists themselves are among the most up in arms at the proposed cuts to federal research funding among universities today.
The Myth of Fed Independence
The standard reply of the Fed and its partisans is that any such measures, however marginal, would encroach on the Fed's independence from politics.
The Young Rothbard: An Uncomfortable Neoclassical Economist
Speaking at the recent Rothbard Graduate Seminar, Dr. Joseph Salerno traces Murray Rothbard‘s intellectual development while in the economics Ph.D. program at Columbia University. Rothbard was dissatisfied with the popular schools of thought until he discovered Austrian economics.
Spotlight: Summer 2025 Research Fellows in Residence
For more than 20 years now, our summer-long fellowship program has offered liberty-minded scholars a place to write, study, publish, and develop their contributions to the fields of economics, history, philosophy, and more. Learn more about this year's cohort!
Why We Need to Read Read
We owe a great debt to Gary Galles for collecting no less than 97 of Leonard Read’s articles, accompanied by a commentary of his own in which he shows their relevance to contemporary issues.
