Mises Daily

Ayn Rand made the case for the freedom philosophy in the most aggressive manner possible, bless her. And, "capitalism" was a crucial element of that effort.

Men do well under a plan and its controls if the Gestalt to be accomplished makes sense, is not too distant, and offers rewards as well as challenges for different levels of skill. But this is quite different from a superimposed, infallible political philosophy which would urge on us an engineered society.

It is just a bit strange that companies would be, on the one hand, attacked for not providing enough in wages and, on the other, required to not provide any wages.

We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here — the thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by the Puritan work ethic, the thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about the individual soul, and so forth.When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for goods and services or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple.

George's own attachment to the land tax, rightly critiqued by Rothbard, is a clear case of Rothbard's Law: the tendency of people to specialize in what they are worst at.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar's Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.]

Since states are created and directed by the boundaries of what people will accept as proper, since they exist only in the vacuum created by the public’s tolerance for aggression, the only lasting way to change the state is to persuade the public to rethink the program.

With medical costs continuing to rise, mostly due to countless previous interventions in the healthcare economy, the unemployed and downsized workers thought that at the very least their Uncle Santa should take care of their medical needs.

Wherever the doctor is being paid by the authorities and not by the patients, the outcome of compulsion is a set of fees that does not cover the investment in expensive instruments. This has an additional effect that could scarcely have been unintended: It forces the patient into governmentally controlled dispensaries which can afford the investment — at the taxpayer's expense.

Currently, the Mises Institute is not officially accredited. However, those who desire to do so can take a final exam and have the results posted online. In this way, economics majors can receive extra credit from professors friendly to the Mises Institute, and finance professionals can curry favor with their bosses if they are fans of the Austrian School.