Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilisation; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free.
According to most commentators, artificially lowering interest rates by the central bank prompts businesses to increase investments in capital goods and the structure of production (e.g., tools, machinery, infrastructure). This is supposed to increase economic growth. In short, artificially lowering interest rates equals economic growth. But does it make any sense?
Looking back on more than a century of expanding bureaucracies, waning civic virtue, and the increasing substitution of state-led planning for individual initiative, the work of Alexis de Tocqueville remains, unfortunately, prescient as ever. Fortunately for modern defenders of liberty, Ralph Raico left behind an unpublished manuscript on Tocqueville, posthumously made available by the Mises Institute.
“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.” - H.L. Mencken
You would think it is impossible to call Ludwig von Mises a fascist. He was of course an old fashioned classical liberal, what we would call today a libertarian. Some extreme leftists have even been stupid enough to claim that Mises was sympathetic to the Nazis. They don’t deny that Mises was a refugee from Nazism, but they say, when it comes down to it, Mises would take fascism, even Nazism, over a Marxist socialist revolution.
Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent argued that the mass communications industry influences public perception in ways that benefit elite interests, all without overt coercion. The book critiques not only the nature of the media but also the very concept of “consent.” Chomsky contends that “consent” has been rendered meaningless by the pervasive use of propaganda to manipulate the masses.
Imagine being famous for saying something you never said, seven centuries after your death. What has come to be known as Occam’s razor—“entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”—has been attributed to English philosopher and theologian William of Occam (1287-1347), though he never used those exact words in his writing. According to conceptually.org,
Elon Musk—via his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency)—exposing and attempting to cut government waste is wonderful. However, it’d be even better if Elon focused more on striking closer to the root of the problem: the public’s economic ignorance from which all the disastrous, coercive, competition-immune, monopolistic government central planning, spending, and also warmongering grows. This is precisely what Ludwig von Mises did, and I like to call it the “Misesian formula” for prosperity. Mises devoted parts of his majestic treatise Human Action (1949) to the formula.
