Mises Daily

The best the state can do to bring about this ideal is to stop interfering in all manner of social and economic relations between people.

In his early years at the university, Mises was a left-liberal and interventionist, although he quickly rejected Marxism.

Mises demonstrated that capitalism is an economic system rationally planned by the combined, self-interested efforts of all who participate in it. The failure of socialism, he showed, results from the fact that it represents not economic planning, but the destruction of economic planning, which exists only under capitalism and the price system.

"His outstanding moral quality was moral courage, the ability to stand alone, and an almost fanatical intellectual honesty and candor that refused to deviate or compromise an inch."

Gary North's government trap or capture model provides an abundant set of predictions about how governments accumulate power and control over industries.

In many ways, the group has been misnamed. Federalism refers to the system of decentralized government. This group defended states rights — the very essence of federalism — against the Federalists, who would have been more accurately described as Nationalists. Nonetheless, what the so-called Antifederalists predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.

But there is no moral norm involved in such issues as whether we own disposal units or what we put in them. Those are merely issues of technology that change with the times; our only restriction is not to impose on others' person or property.

The human tragedy that produced the Lord of the Flies atmosphere in New Orleans was due to the fact that government had turned much of the Crescent City into an urban reservation via its welfare system, and when those who depended heavily upon that system for their sustenance found themselves on their own, they had no idea what to do or how to do it.

In the wake of two major hurricanes and the calls for federal intervention, we repost Vedran Vuk's classic 2006 article that detailed how by "doing its job," FEMA blocked economic recovery in New Orleans after the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.