Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action was published on this date in 1949. From the beginning, the Mises Institute’s mission has been to champion this book’s importance in the history of economic thought.

In the words of Henry Hazlitt, in his New York Times Review:

America is about growth and getting big, supersized, or bigly, as the president would say. There’s no debate, growth is good, in fact essential; bigger is better.

Is American politics reaching a breaking point? A recent study by researchers from Brown and Stanford Universities certainly paints a grim picture of the state of the national discourse. The study attempts to measure “affective polarization,” defined as the extent to which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than their own, in nine developed countries, including the United States.

Chapter 10 of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market ([1962, 1970] 2009), “Monopoly and Competition,” proffers a compelling reelaboration of monopoly theory: it highlights, indeed, some inconsistencies within the neoclassical analysis conventionally held as true and taught in undergraduate and graduate microeconomics classes.

A reader recently reminded me of this great old podcast from 2013. Lew Rockwell and I talk for half an hour about my little book Commie Cowboys, the politics of the Western genre, and why the anti-Westerns were better than those old John Wayne ones.

Amity Shlaes is chairman of the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, she is a classical liberal, and she knows economics. She much appreciates Mises’s emphasis on property and bureaucracy, both of which influence her work. She has authored six books, including three New York Times bestsellers, on Calvin Coolidge, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

During March and April of this year—during the early days of the covid-19 panic—each day came to be accompanied by a general feeling of dread. As new emergency orders and decrees rained down from governors, mayors, and faceless health bureaucrats, I wondered, What new awful thing will governments think up today? As business and churches were closed by government edict, politicians increasingly were threatening to arrest and jail ordinary citizens for doing things that were perfectly legal mere days before.