The Week in Review: December 31, 2016
Happy New Year from the Mises Institute!
Ralph Raico: Liberalism Defined
Get Ready for Passport “Globalization”
“The bottom line is that anyone can be ISIS. We therefore need an approach to securing civilized societies that doesn’t allow individuals to hide behind the cloak of Western passports… The time has come for a “global passport,” a parallel digital certification of a person’s identity, background, criminal record, travel history, and other details. The digital record would be regularly updated based on databases from airlines, customs agencies, banks and other sources, and could be managed by an independent international authority.”
Top Ten Most-Read Mises Wire Articles in 2016
Mises.org continues to be one of the most high-traffic economics and commentary sites on the web, read by millions every year.
In 2016, we published more than 1,000 new original articles in our online publication Mises Wire, with total readers increasing 34% from 2015 to 2016, while total sessions — each visit to the site which can include visits to multiple articles — increased by 32 percent.
Of all the great articles we published this year, here are the Top Ten most read on Mises.org:
The Political Left’s Shmoo Theory of Education
“Uneducated” is the favorite insult and excuse of the political left. In the past year alone, for example, a lack of education among voters has been used to explain each of the left’s electoral failures, as well as to dismiss criticisms of its people, policies, and institutions. These defenses are dubious to say the least. Yet setting aside the strategic choices of left-wing political groups, the obsession with un-education reveals that there are serious problems with the way education is understood by the intellectual classes.
Individualism and Civilization
The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. All the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilization were the result of the operation of this idea of liberty.
Mises on the Myth of Marx
Every once in a while, even The Economist gets it right. In a review of an intellectual biography of Marx (Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion), published this past fall, they argue that “the myth is more impressive than the reality”.
The Christmas Truce and the Future of War
This article is adapted from this December 2015 Mises Weekends interview.
Jeff Deist: Our guest this weekend is in the studio with me. He’s Judge John Denson, a great war historian and a lawyer who helped Lew Rockwell found the Mises Institute right here in Auburn in the early 1980s.