[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “The Ignorance of the New Yorker .”] “One can only shake one’s head sadly at such a grotesque panoply of misinformation and outright falsehoods. One is tempted to dismiss anyone who takes it seriously as delusional.” The August 30 issue of the New Yorker contains an article called “
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Anarchism and Terrorism.”] As Alex Butterworth tells the tale, it was “in the early years of the twenty-first century,” when a British Home Secretary recommended that those wishing to understand what at that time was still termed the “War on Terror” should look back to the 1890s.
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “John T. Flynn: Revisionist Journalist.”] To simply say, as I did recently , that John T. Flynn, the American journalist who lived from 1882 to 1964, was a liberal does not really explain why he is important to modern libertarians. Flynn was a liberal, all right. But so were lots of
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Ira Levin”] Ira Levin was an American novelist, playwright, and songwriter who is best known today, three years after his death, for the immensely successful film versions of his least interesting novels. Levin was born in the Bronx on August 27, 1929. He grew up there and on the Upper
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “The Auctioneer”] Joan Samson was a Depression baby, born in 1937. She died of cancer in 1976, when she was still in her 30s. In 1975, the year before her death, she published her only novel, The Auctioneer . This seems to be just about the sum total of what is publicly known regarding
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Libertarian Science Fiction”] One day in the late spring of 1951, something rather astonishing happened in an otherwise nondescript shopping district in a medium-sized city somewhere in the American Midwest. Right there, right smack in the middle of the block, where Aunt Sally’s Lunch
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Libertarian Science Fiction II”] This essay is about four writers, none of whom was a libertarian, but each of whom wrote something back in the 1960s that made a significant contribution to the libertarian tradition. The first of the four was a science-fiction writer, though only
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction”] Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna on the eighth day of May 1899. When he graduated from the University of Vienna in 1921, at the age of 22, he applied for a job with the Austrian Office of Claims Accounts, the government agency
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Ambiguous Utopias”] The mid-1970s — meaning, let us say, the five-year period encompassing the years 1973, ‘74, ‘75, ‘76, and ‘77 — was a heady time for the modern American libertarian movement. To those of us who were involved back then, it seemed we were on the verge of a major
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “C.M. Kornbluth (1923–1958)”] The late Samuel Edward Konkin III was a firm believer in the power of science fiction to spread the libertarian message. He himself had been converted to libertarianism partly by reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein , and Heinlein remained his favorite
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.