“Believe it or not, there are a few things worse than the state.” While browsing the blogosphere, Mises.org readers may have come across self-styled “left-libertarians.” You may even consider yourself something of a left-libertarian. Some of these folk, like the philosopher Roderick Long, have some very sound ideas, and many deep insights. There
[David Gordon and Daniel Sanchez will be teaching Libertarian Ethics , an online course starting October 27.] In Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War , the rhetorical orations of ancient Greek statesmen often alternated between appealing to honor and to interest: to justice and to expediency. [1] Similarly, modern classical liberals
“The only fully Misesian economists are Rothbardians, and most Rothbardians have abandoned Mises’s entire approach to the ‘why’ of liberalism.” Students of classic liberalism and Austrian economics might come across a curious inconsistency concerning the doctrine of utilitarianism in Austro-liberal literature. On one hand, you may find vigorous
A great deal of truth can be unveiled via “Crusoe economics” — the analysis of acting man in complete isolation. However, just as it takes two to tango, it also takes two to trade and two to fight; therefore, in the sciences of human action, it takes at least two (a Crusoe and a Friday) for questions of property , exchange , and justice to even
Robinson Crusoe is walking along the beach when he sees a little face looking up at him, half-buried in the sand. He digs it out, and finds that it is a little wooden statue of a pagan deity. Friday is on the same beach, looking through a chest full of odds and ends that has washed up from a shipwreck. He finds a thick book with a cross on it. It
Intellectual property is inherently disruptive to the market mechanism, as the latter is understood by Austrian economics, and is thus prejudicial to human welfare. To understand why, one must first understand the social function of entrepreneurship in the market economy. Entrepreneurs arrange and deploy the factors of production in order to
The excellent personal tech columnist Walter Mossberg discusses the marketing genius exhibited by Steve Jobs (who just announced his retirement ) throughout his career (see video below). About Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s introduction of the Apple II, he says, They popularized the idea of the personal computer. () But after bringing the personal
The city of Salem, Oregon invoked a law that prohibits residents from having more than three yard sales per year to shut down a woman with terminal bone cancer who was trying to raise money to pay her medical bills. The Reddit community is aghast at such heartlessness. Yet they do not realize that most of them support policies that result in
Mises wrote , “No foreign aggressor can destroy capitalist civilization if it does not destroy itself.” This implies that the sole way a foreign aggressor can contribute toward capitalist civilization’s destruction is to goad it into destroying itself. That was what Osama Bin Laden was trying to do all along. And the war party (along with its
Genghis Khan . Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history – after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest. The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims
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.