Murray Rothbard’s theory of punishment has often been misunderstood. Economists who have written on punishment and mentioned Rothbard find his “double restitution” idea puzzling, because they think about it only in terms of economic efficiency. This isn’t what he has in mind. He is combining economics and moral philosophy. Many economists reason
Ludwig von Mises rejects the standard arguments for democracy. Not for him are the alleged virtues of public deliberation. For him, there is only one argument for democracy that is convincing. He says that only democracy allows for a peaceful change of power. Every government, he thinks, rests on popular consent. If a sufficient number of people
I’d like to discuss what is sometimes claimed to be a major problem for theories of rights like that of Murray Rothbard, which start from the principle of self-ownership and incorporate a Lockean principle of initial appropriation of resources. In brief, you own yourself; you “mix your labor” with unowned land or resources, and in this way you
I’d like to discuss today an argument that is popular among some contemporary political philosophers. If this argument is correct, it undermines the sort of natural rights found in Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty. I hope that I am not spoiling the surprise by telling you immediately that I think the argument is wrong. Natural rights of the
It’s often claimed that support for the free market rests on the ideology of social Darwinism. According to this nefarious doctrine, Charles Darwin showed that evolution is a process of struggle. In it, the strong, meaning those best able to reproduce, supplant the weak. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, it is
In the past few weeks, I have been discussing a number of points in Human Action , and today I propose to concentrate on a fundamental insight that is a main theme of the book. There are, Mises says, only two ways to organize production in a complex modern economy that produces a great many goods and services. One is by centralized decision-making
Economists often concentrate on narrow technical specialties. In doing so, they sometimes fall into philosophical errors, because they uncritically take for granted assumptions that are philosophically mistaken or at least controversial. The most common instance of this is familiar. Many economists assume that normative judgments, as opposed to
Many readers will already know that Ludwig von Mises considers the Nazi economy to be a form of socialism. In the Nazi system, private property in production goods existed in name only. The ostensible owners were merely managers bound to follow the government’s directives. Rainer Zitelmann, the foremost authority on Adolf Hitler’s economic
Last week I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s important letter to the New York Times in June 1942 about the Nazi economy. In the letter, Mises says that foreign trade poses a difficult problem for a socialist economy. Unlike the citizens of a country controlled by central planning, those in foreign countries don’t have to accept goods offered to
Lord Acton was one of the greatest classical liberal historians of the nineteenth century, but his view of the War between the States has in some circles occasioned dismay. Acton, in a letter of 1866 to Robert E. Lee, said , “I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake
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.