Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. In my column last week, I said that Senator Josh Hawley’s book The Tyranny of Big Tech raises important issues, and I’d like this week to go into one of these. He notes that Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search have immense influence on the news and political opinions
Steven B. Smith in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2021) gives us an excellent example of a fallacious way of arguing. Once we see how Smith, a Yale political science and philosophy professor who should know better, falls into this pattern, we will get a clear idea of what the fallacy is and how to avoid it. The
In Human Action , Mises suggests that opposition to economic theory intensified as the theory developed. When the subjectivist school showed that economics isn’t limited to a separate sphere, but rather that all human action can be studied scientifically, the opposition went so far as to challenge reason itself. Before economic theory got started,
In Human Action , Mises anticipates an issue that has been at the heart of political philosophy for the past thirty years or so. The discussion in political philosophy has centered on issues raised by John Rawls in Political Liberalism (1993). Rawls says that in modern nation-states, individuals and groups have different “conceptions of the good.”
According to Marxists, the subjective theory of value is just bourgeois apologetics. By using the subjective theory, economists conceal the fact that the proletariat under capitalism is exploited. The labor theory of value shows that labor is the source of all surplus commodity value not accounted for by the cost of production of a commodity. The
During the eighteenth century, capitalism in Europe “took off” in a way it had not done before, and as a result the West surpassed all other areas of the world in economic growth. What led to this transformation? Max Weber offers the most famous answer. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he traces the new system to the
Sometimes people claim the free market is unfair to future generations. Mises says again and again that capitalism is a system of “mass production for the masses” directed by the “dollar-votes” of consumers, and the consumers he is talking about are people who now exist. These people will act to secure their interests, but what about those who
In a famous lecture delivered in August 1819, the great classical liberal Benjamin Constant contrasts the ancient and modern conceptions of liberty. By the “ancient conception,” Constant means the liberty of the citizens of a state to rule themselves, as opposed to rule by despots, whether foreign or domestic. He has primarily in mind the ancient
Those of us who support a noninterventionist foreign policy find in Murray Rothbard’s work an inexhaustible source of facts and arguments. Mises, by contrast, usually doesn’t comment on foreign policy issues. Sometimes he did, but you won’t find in his published writings his views on the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’d like
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The French political philosopher Pierre Manent has a view of politics that my readers are likely to reject, and rightly so. He has written a great deal about the French classical liberals, especially Tocqueville, but his heart lies more in the study of the classics. In his books, such as
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.