In his important book The Failure of American Conservatism (2023), the political theorist and philosopher Claes G. Ryn offers some criticisms of libertarianism and free-market capitalism, and in this week’s column, I’d like to examine these. Ryn is not an opponent of all forms of the free market, but he fears an extreme version of it can be
The philosopher Terrance Tomkow (1950-2024) passed away last Friday night, January 12, 2024. He was best known as a philosopher of language and made important contributions to metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the free will problem. For most readers of the Mises page, though, what will probably be of most interest are his posts about
Socialism: A Logical Introduction Scott R. Sehon Oxford University Press, 2024; 268 pp. This is a better book than I expected it to be, but it is not without its problems. Scott Sehon, a philosophy professor at Bowdoin College, is strongly inclined to believe that socialism is better than capitalism, but in the book, his main aim is to set forward
Thomas Hill Green, an eighteenth-century English philosopher, didn’t believe it was possible to have a good society without a powerful state. David Gordon explains why Green’s argument fails to impress. Original Article: Why Society Doesn’t Need the
Limitarianism: The Case against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid RobeynsAstra House, 2022; 301 pp. Some people have vastly more income and wealth than others, and this situation greatly disturbs Ingrid Robeyns, who teaches ethics at Utrecht University. She does not want to replace the market economy with central planning, but no one should be
How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity by Rainer Zitelmann Encounter Books, 2024; xiii + 212 pp. Rainer Zitelmann has a well-deserved reputation as a defender of the free market; few, if any, can match his immense capacity for amassing relevant facts and using them effectively to support his arguments. This
Life after Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money by George Gilder Regnery Gateway, 2023; 212 pp. George Gilder looks at things in an original way, but this is not always a virtue. There is much good sense in Life after Capitalism , but to find it readers will have to wade through a great deal of
The Prophets of Doom by Neema Parvini Imprint Academic, 2023; 227 pp. It was to be expected that Neema Parvini would give us an excellent book, and he has not disappointed us. Parvini is an outstanding Shakespeare critic and has written an important book on property rights, The Defenders of Liberty. In The Prophets of Doom , he discusses with
“These days, Stoicism is very fashionable, and popular books on this subject are easy to find. Ludwig von Mises drew from a different tradition of Greek ethics, Epicureanism.” Presented at the 2024 Human Action Conference on Friday, 17 May 2024, at the Mises Institute in Auburn,
Ludwig von Mises maintains that there are two ways of looking at ethics: one is that ethics is about how each person can satisfy his personal preferences, and the other is that there is an objective law that dictates what people ought to do. Mises places almost all ethical systems except for utilitarianism, which he sometimes call eudaemonism, in
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.