This week on Wednesday 26th at around 2:30 of the afternoon military forces in ski masks took Plaza Murillo, the main plaza where the seat of the Bolivian government resides. Actions that at first seemed totally out of the ordinary, actions taken from history books, as a military coup has not happened since the 1980’s.
Julian Assange’s heroic but tragic life has taken an unexpected turn for the better with his recent liberation through a plea deal with the US government.
In his review of F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, Murray Rothbard takes issue with the Hayekian case for freedom, which rests solely on human ignorance.
Lew Rockwell has dedicated his life to spreading the ideas of the Austrian School. Today, we honor Lew on his birthday, and it’s only fitting we release the trailer for our new documentary, Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. With your help, we will release it to the public right before the election.
Prof. Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted Mises’s philosophical rigor:
I started out in my intellectual development as a left-winger. That was a time of the Vietnam War and the student protests all around the United States and also in Europe. And this generation, of course, is often blamed for the successive leftward turn of Germany and the march through the institutions that was recommended by the Italian commie Gramsci. And that still continues to this day, but with some signs appearing on the horizon that the end of this rope may be near.
In Ludwig von Mises’s intellectual testament, Memoirs, he discusses his life and work in Europe prior to 1940. In that book he reveals that he first read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics around Christmastime in 1903. “It was through this book,” Mises relates, “that I became an economist.” Before that, in his first years at the University of Vienna, he was schooled in historicist interventionism.
John Maynard Keynes was wrong about most things, but he was absolutely correct when he stated that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We might say this about most “elites” in governments today. Even those who have never seriously studied economics are nonetheless greatly influenced by the books and ideas of economists from decades past. This is true of most everyone whether they know it or not.
Human behavior is, to a large extent, socially constructed. People often act based on social norms, expectations, or habits rather than by attempting to ascertain the nature of reality itself. In that context, it is true to say that people’s perceptions of reality are socially constructed, as explained by the Thomas theorem:
