Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Senator Josh Hawley’s just-published The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery, 2021) raises important issues. Hawley asks, for example, Do Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube censor views that that their managers do not like? It seems clear that the answer is yes. Many people who have tried to post
Students often ask me to recommend a good introduction to philosophy, and now the question can be answered more easily than in years past. Michael Huemer’s Knowledge, Value, and Reality , published last April, contains a profusion of arguments on important topics and is written in a conversational style that is easy to follow, and is often very
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. In my column last week, I said that Senator Josh Hawley’s book The Tyranny of Big Tech raises important issues, and I’d like this week to go into one of these. He notes that Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search have immense influence on the news and political opinions
On March 2, 1966, Murray N. Rothbard, the founder and twenty-year editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies , would have celebrated his seventieth birthday. This issue of the JLS , as well as a simultaneously appearing special issue of its sister publication, the Review of Austrian Economics , likewise founded and edited by Rothbard, is a
In Human Action , Mises anticipates an issue that has been at the heart of political philosophy for the past thirty years or so. The discussion in political philosophy has centered on issues raised by John Rawls in Political Liberalism (1993). Rawls says that in modern nation-states, individuals and groups have different “conceptions of the good.”
Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life by F. H. Buckley Encounter Books, 2021 xx + 228 pages Frank Buckley, a Canadian-born lawyer who teaches at the Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, has given us in this remarkable book a philosophy of life, based on unusually wide knowledge and penetrating reflection. In what follows, I shall
I’d like to discuss what is sometimes claimed to be a major problem for theories of rights like that of Murray Rothbard, which start from the principle of self-ownership and incorporate a Lockean principle of initial appropriation of resources. In brief, you own yourself; you “mix your labor” with unowned land or resources, and in this way you
Today would have been the ninety-second birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends; and when you
It’s often claimed that support for the free market rests on the ideology of social Darwinism. According to this nefarious doctrine, Charles Darwin showed that evolution is a process of struggle. In it, the strong, meaning those best able to reproduce, supplant the weak. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, it is
Economists often concentrate on narrow technical specialties. In doing so, they sometimes fall into philosophical errors, because they uncritically take for granted assumptions that are philosophically mistaken or at least controversial. The most common instance of this is familiar. Many economists assume that normative judgments, as opposed to
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.