Several months ago, I debated Thaddeus Russell on The Tom Woods Show . The proposition debated was “Postmodern philosophy is compatible with a politics of individual liberty.” Thaddeus defended the proposition and I opposed it. Here, I want to flesh out some of the points I made in the debate, adding more context than I could marshal under the
In the previous installments of this series ( part I , part II ), I have argued that government default is not only ethical, it is also beneficial to the economy and society as a whole. The one question I left open at the end of part II was the possible consequences for financial markets and the monetary system in the case of a government default.
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) embodies a political trend that cripples human rights in the guise of crusading for them. This trend is the balkanization, or fragmentation, of rights. Recently passed by the House, VAWA has moved to the Senate, where the trend it represents may well be translated into more law. Identity politics and its
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. March 31 gave us a statement on the American Jobs Plan, and April 28 saw President Joe Biden speak on it to the American people (well, roughly 8 percent of the American people ). The goal of the law is the following : While the American Rescue Plan is changing the course of the pandemic
Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America? George F. Babbitt is novelist Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist in the novel of the same name. Babbitt is a real estate man, which is to say a salesman, but the newfangled 1920s term is “Realtor ™. “ Incurious, smug, self-satisfied, and utterly predictable, Babbitt is well pleased with his
The “transitory” inflation swamping the country has stubbornly persisted into July. Producer prices posted a second straight 1 percent month-over-month increase , which brought the full-year number to a record 7.8 percent. Twelve-month US export prices rose 17.2 percent, and nearly 22 percent if the rate of the first seven months of 2021 were
Some of you may know the name Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist who comes from a left-liberal background. He has been absolutely fearless and tireless on Twitter over the past eighteen months, documenting the overreach and folly of covid policy—and the mixed reality behind official assurances on everything from social
This book offers an account of Hegel that will surprise many readers—at least it surprised me. The political philosopher Leo Strauss often criticized “historicism,” the view that human beings do not have a fixed nature or essence. Instead, as José Ortega y Gasset put it, “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is—history.” G.W.F. Hegel was one
How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity: A Metamodern Economic Reform Proposal by Justin Carmien Manticore Press, 2022; 272 pp. Neither I nor Justin Carmien, the author of How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity , is an economist. Carmien’s book, however, is not a work of economics but a philosophical attempt to apply Heideggerian metaphysics to
Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, two of the best-known Austrian school economists in the twentieth century, may have followed the same school of thought, but they greatly differed in their work. In consideration of human action, the two men differed in their methodology: Mises advocated for a pure use of reason through praxeology, and Hayek,
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.