It may be that wary beasts of the forest come around to accepting the hunter’s trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food. At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without them; in all his economic calculations his first consideration
Wherever two boys swap tops for marbles, that is the marketplace. The simple barter, in terms of human happiness, is no different from a trade transaction involving banking operations, insurance, ships, railroads, wholesale and retail establishments; for in any case the effect and purpose of trade is to make up a lack of satisfactions. The boy
[From One is a Crowd , by Frank Chodorov, 1952.] It all began, as you know, with the Declaration of Independence. The Americans stated their case, both as to the disabilities put upon them by the British Crown and as to the kind of government they considered it fitting for men to live under. The indictment was rejected and the issue was joined in
[This article is excerpted from chapter two of The Rise and Fall of Society .] Is the State ordered in the nature of things? The classical theorists in political science were so persuaded. Observing that every agglomeration of humans known to history was attended with a political institution of some kind, and convinced that in all human affairs
The search for a formula for the “good society” has never been abandoned, hope being what it is, and out of the laboratory of the human mind has come a congeries of utopias. The connotation of unreality that the word has acquired follows from the fact that every utopia ignores the central operating lever of man: he seeks to satisfy his desires
[This article is excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Society (1959). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .] Anyone who speculates on man’s ability to put his social life in perfect order must take into account the biological fact of longevity. Man seeks to satisfy his desires while he lives, not
[This article is excerpted from chapter 14 of Out of Step (1962). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Steven Ng, is available for download .] In New York, in the fall of 1936, I happened in one night at the Players Club. As I sat at a table with a couple of men, I noticed a dignified, elderly gentleman playing pool. He was very
[Excerpted from chapter 10 of Out of Step (1962). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Colin Hussey, is available for download .] A young fellow has to have a “cause.” Utopianism is as natural a disease for the boy of college age as was measles in his childhood. My malady was anarchism. I don’t know whether I took to Kropotkin and
[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Out of Step . An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Steven Ng, is available for download .] Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) The Secretary of the Thoreau Society reports increasing interest in this famous “ne’er-do-well.” It takes a long time for word-of-mouth advertising to get around, but
[Excerpted from Out of Step (1962)] In the century since Marx propounded the theories on which he based the inevitability of the coming of socialism, every one of these theories has been proven fallacious, until now when even the avowed socialists avoid mentioning them. And yet, socialism is with us. It has come not by way of Marx but by methods
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.