Max Keiser, in pursuit of his efforts to show that Mises lapsed into error in monetary theory owing to his deviations from Menger, has recently posted “Menger and Mises: The Essential Difference.” The post is credited to “adamsmith1684”; whether this is Keiser himself I do not know. To complicate matters, the post begins with a quotation from
A specter is haunting Robert Frank’s latest book — the specter of libertarianism. For him, it is a doctrinaire view with little to recommend it; yet he again and again seems drawn both to try to refute it and to deflect it. Libertarianism he takes to be wrong; but even those who accept it, he thinks, ought to see that his proposals for progressive
Murray Rothbard regarded Ronald Hamowy as the funniest person he had ever known, and when I met him in 1979, it was easy to see why. Once in a bookstore near UC Berkeley, he paid for a book by credit card, which wasn’t then as common as it is today. The sales clerk said, “This is all right, but personally I just use credit cards in emergencies.”
No one who met Jim Sadowsky could ever forget him. I first saw him at a conference at Claremont University in California in August 1979; his great friend Bill Baumgarth, a political science professor at Fordham, was also there. His distinctive style of conversation at once attracted my attention. He spoke in a very terse way, and he had no
To review Thomas Nagel’s new book for the Mises Daily seems at first sight a misplaced endeavor. The book has nothing to say about libertarianism or Austrian economics; moreover, Nagel’s own political views are decidedly non-libertarian. He wrote the most influential critical review of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia , and he rejects Lockean
Whatever the failings of this book, its author has a sense of humor. Peikoff writes of his unusual name for his main hypothesis, In order to refer to all three modes [of integration] together, I have coined the acronym DIM. Given my symbolism, I myself can be identified, even ridiculed, as a DIM-wit, “wit” in the old sense of intelligence. I
Jason Brennan, an outstanding libertarian political philosopher who teaches at Georgetown University, has written Libertarianism as an introductory guide, and much of the material in it will be familiar to readers of the Mises Daily ; but it deserves careful study by anyone interested in its subject. Brennan has a talent for explaining libertarian
The efforts, spurred by Mayor Bloomberg, to ban large cans of drinks deemed too sugary have been much in the news lately; and a peculiar point in the mayor’s defense of this measure is highly relevant to Laurence Vance’s excellent book. What struck me as odd in the mayor’s comments was that he confined his defense to pointing out the dangers to
Robert Skidelsky is best known for his three-volume biography of Lord Keynes, and his son Edward is a philosopher who has written an excellent book on Ernst Cassirer . How Much Is Enough? contains valuable discussions of happiness research in economics and of global warming, as well as a capsule history of a good deal of both Western and Asian
Libertarian Anarchy would have delighted Murray Rothbard . In this book, a distinguished Irish philosopher defends forcefully and eloquently Rothbardian anarchism. Like Rothbard , Casey considers the state a criminal organization, one that by its nature violates essential human rights. To those who say that whatever its failings, the state is
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.