Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Many people think that a universal basic income (UBI) would be a good substitute for the welfare state. Under this proposal, each person resident in a country would receive a guaranteed income, sufficient to live at a modest level. People would get the money unconditionally. Unlike
A recent post by Francis P. Sempa on the University Bookman site offers valuable information on the genesis of James Burnham’s Cold War global crusading. Burnham, who worked after World War II as a CIA agent, was the dominant intellectual influence behind William Buckley’s efforts at National Review to purge Old Right advocates of a
Many readers will be familiar with Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism , a brilliant criticism of the state’s authority that arrives at conclusions similar to those of Lysander Spooner. Wolff is probably best known for his work on Kant, but he has published penetrating accounts of Marx and Rawls as well. He thinks that Marx offers an
I ended my article last week with a rash assertion. Marx says that capitalists exploit workers, and I countered that this claim depends on the false labor theory of value. It is vital to bear in mind that when Marx talks about exploitation, he has a technical sense of the concept in mind, rather than the popular sense, in which “exploitation”
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley Random House, 2018 xix + 218 pages Jason Stanley, a noted philosopher of language who teaches at Yale, wishes to render to the public a great service. He will tell us how fascism works, and, as the present tense in his title
I’ve often argued against John Rawls’s theory of justice, and readers who see my title might be thinking to themselves, “Not another post on Rawls!” These readers can rest easy; this is not another post attacking Rawls. (It isn’t, of course, a post that says Rawls was right.) Instead, I want to use an argument someone directed against Rawls to
Murray Rothbard was a polymath, and philosophy is one of the fields to which he made important contributions. When people think of him as a philosopher, though, they often have in mind only his work in ethics and political philosophy, found, for example, in The Ethics of Liberty . His work in this area is of great significance, but he wrote about
Capitalism is increasingly under attack these days by people who claim that it promotes a collapse of moral values, subordinating all else to the pursuit of individual wealth and pleasure. Often these critics demand either the strict supervision of the free market by elite government administrators or its outright replacement by socialism. In this
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter Random House, 2021 [2020] xxii + 628 pages For many people, though not, to be sure, readers of The Austrian , John Maynard Keynes ranks as the greatest economist of the twentieth century; but for Zachary D. Carter, this is a restrained understatement.
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
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.