In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss two arguments Murray Rothbard gives that respond to influential criticisms of the free market. His answers to the two arguments follow a common strategy. In each case, he rejects the key premise of the argument. The first of these arguments has to do with what are called “public” or “collective” goods. It
Understanding Money Mechanics by Robert P. Murphy Mises Institute, 2021, 210 pp. Robert Murphy aims to provide the “intelligent layperson a concise yet comprehensive overview of the theory, history, and practice of money and banking, with a focus on the United States” (p. 9), and he succeeds in doing so, but I do not propose here to concentrate on
Libertarians stress self-ownership and property rights, but one variant position, held by Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, limits property rights. In their view, which they derived from the nineteenth-century economist and social reformer Henry George, you own only the value your labor adds to the resources you appropriate. You do not own
An old joke expresses one of the most common criticisms of the free market. “What is the most beautiful word in the English language? Cash.” The free market, it is alleged, has no place for values that have no price in money. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto offer a classic statement of this point of view: The bourgeoisie,
“Fascist” these days is little more than a term of abuse for opponents and has no cognitive value, but in what follows I’ll be using it in a precise sense, to designate a supporter of the regime established by Benito Mussolini in Italy. Was Ludwig von Mises in this sense a Fascist or a Fascist sympathizer? The question on its face seems absurd,
The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard Simon and Schuster, 2022 viii + 373 pp. Christopher Leonard’s book brings to mind the familiar line from Faust: “Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast.” Leonard offers a penetrating criticism of the Fed’s vast expansion of the money supply, which has
It’s well known that Murray Rothbard thinks that intellectuals play a crucial role in getting the public to accept the state. Why are these “court intellectuals” needed? The necessity arises from the nature of the state. Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard maintains that the state is a predatory organization: it uses coercion
Many people criticize the free market as “materialistic”; it reduces everything to monetary values. Murray Rothbard analyzes this charge against the free market, and in this week’s column, I’d like to consider his distinct perspective. He first sets the stage : One of the most common charges levelled against the free market (even by many of its
In his ambitious new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022), the distinguished Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony poses a sharp challenge to the view that freedom is the highest political value, and in this week’s column, I’d like to address his challenge, which I find illuminating, though mistaken. By “freedom,” I mean what Rothbard,
Richard Arneson has been a major figure in political philosophy for the last few decades, and in this week’s article, I’d like to look at some points he raises in his article “Liberal Egalitarian Critiques,” his contribution to The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism , pp. 564–78. In the article, Arneson distinguishes between “hard”
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.