The collapse of the American-backed state in Afghanistan brings home the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s essay “The Death of a State,” written in July 1975. The lessons that Rothbard drew from the fall of South Vietnam apply equally to the present crisis. Among these were the importance of guerilla warfare, the dependence of all states on majority
Today is Walter Block’s 80 th birthday. The title of most famous book, Defending the Undefendable , best captures his way of looking at the world. He will take a libertarian principle and deduce consequences from it with iron consistency, often using imaginative examples while doing so. You may think he is wrong, but you will find it more
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fifth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated
Professor Toshio Murata of the Yokohama College of Commerce died on March 12, 2021, at the venerable age of ninety-seven. During World War II, he was a staff officer responsible for economic planning in Shanghai, under the Japanese occupation. He soon found out that central planning in a city of that size did not work, and, when his opinions
Jonathan Culbreath, posting on the American Conservative web page (March 24, 2021), urges his fellow conservatives to adopt a fashionable leftist bromide, modern monetary theory (MMT). Mr. Culbreath relies for his account of MMT on the popular book by Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth , which I reviewed here . According to MMT, a government that
A recent post by Francis P. Sempa on the University Bookman site offers valuable information on the genesis of James Burnham’s Cold War global crusading. Burnham, who worked after World War II as a CIA agent, was the dominant intellectual influence behind William Buckley’s efforts at National Review to purge Old Right advocates of a
Julie Ponesse, a philosophy professor specializing in ethics who until recently taught at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, has a moving video in which she protests the requirement at her university that she get a covid-19 vaccination in order to continue teaching. She points out that it is her absolute right to decide what substances
The famous French socialist economist Thomas Piketty thinks we aren’t moving toward equality fast enough. In his Long Live Socialism! , he says this to illustrate how much work remains to be done: ”The poorest 50% of the world’s population is still the poorest 50% of the world’s population” (p.13 of the Amazon Kindle
I am sorry to have to report that Bob Wenzel has passed away. He was the editor and publisher of the popular websites Economic Policy Journal and Target Liberty and also published an investment newsletter. I met Bob many years ago at a Mises Institute conference and was immediately impressed by his enthusiasm for Austrian economics and libertarian
Because of the deep division in America between red states and blue states, there has been much talk of secession. Is the United States too big? Would people be happier in smaller communities? Frank Buckley, a distinguished professor at the Scalia Law School, breaks with most of his fellow legal academics by taking these questions seriously. In a
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.