The mission of the Mises Institute is to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace. Sound economics is at the center of all this, and it’s not a coincidence that our founder, Lew Rockwell, built up the Institute’s faculty around economics and economists. A keen understanding of economics has always been at the center of understanding the state, its socialism, and its wars. The twentieth century’s great freedom fighters, like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, pursued economics in part because it provides key insights into how freedom is both destroyed and preserved.
Sometimes I am asked why we focus on economics. Why study it at all? Some claim that it’s too boring a topic to attract many people to the cause of freedom and free markets. My response is that understanding economics is the way to understanding how the state’s ruling class is ripping us off. For example, without a basic understanding of money and inflation, it is impossible to see the many ways that the regime is impoverishing us through easy money and through the banking cartel. Knowledge of economics reveals to us the countless ways that the productive class is continually impoverished by the parasite class. Otherwise, how are we to understand the ways we are being ruined by interventions like inflation, bailouts, healthcare cartels, income taxes, wars, and much more? An education in economics reveals the me
Nor should we think that sound economics does not resonate with a great many people. With his message of economic freedom—which focused heavily on opposing the Federal Reserve—Ron Paul became a household name. His “End the Fed” campaigns greatly wounded the Fed’s prestige, and it has never fully recovered. Thank goodness.
But the state of economics education in our schools and universities has done nothing to help. This reflects the generally declining quality of our educational institutions. Unfortunately, this decline in quality is exactly what we’d expect from decades of state-subsidized “education,” which exists to push government-approved curricula and ideologies. Not even the ostensibly private institutions are exempt. These are now so heavily reliant on federal grants and loans that only a small handful of financially independent schools, such as Grove City College, escape the federal funding trap.
In this issue of The Misesian, two of our scholars, Paul Cwik and Tate Fegley, discuss how our colleges and universities have been failing students, both generally and specifically in economics. The way economics is taught at most government schools tends to be especially problematic. After all, if economics reveals the problems with the state’s countless schemes to rob us, we should not be surprised that the regime is not exactly wild about sound economics instruction.
This is why the Mises Institute focuses so much on providing an alternative to economics as taught in government schools. Few will learn the insights of the Austrian School from the standard education. So we must provide a place for students to learn from our own faculty, and we must continue to publish the books and journals which preserve and expand that knowledge. We must also continue to support budding teachers and scholars by giving them a place to write and learn freely.
We certainly cannot rely on the state-controlled schools to teach sound economics. It isn’t just an oversight. The regime doesn’t want us to understand economics. It’s our job to teach what the regime doesn’t want us to know.
