Ludwig von Mises didn’t like references to the “miracle” of the marketplace or the “magic” of production or other terms that suggest that economic systems depend on some force that is beyond human comprehension. In his view, we are better off coming to a rational understanding of why markets are responsible for astounding levels of productivity
It’s easy to get discouraged in the Age of Obama, a man who can say, in Castro’s Cuba, that there is not much difference between communism and capitalism. And in his warped mind, I guess it’s sort of true, since his program is a mixture. That is, it’s fascist. Combine his corporatism with envy, perpetual war, negative interest rates, the police
[Delivered at a memorial service at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 20, 1995.] Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a worldwide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. ”Give me a short description of his thought and contributions,” said the reporter when this free-market giant died at the
Fifty years ago this year, Murray N. Rothbard offered his thoughts on National Review , the flagship magazine of American conservatism, which had commemorated its tenth anniversary in late 1965. He went on to tell the full story in The Betrayal of the American Right , at once an intellectual history and a memoir. Murray’s primary complaint: what
Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day? There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order. But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more
This talk was delivered at the Boston Mises Circle on October 1, 2016. Last week marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, and that’s an appropriate moment to revisit Guido Hulsmann’s brilliant biography of this great man, Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism . I commend this book to you, incidentally, not simply for its profile
The most definitive study on fascism written in these years was As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and scholar of a liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. It was the New Deal that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR into fascism, while Flynn himself kept the old faith. That
Super Tuesday may have been the beginning of the end for the Bernie Sanders campaign, but the ideas that propelled it are likely to linger for quite some time. With some writers comparing Bernie to Ron Paul (not in terms of economics and philosophy, of course, but as insurgent candidates), now seemed like an opportune moment to examine the Sanders
The very first votes of the 2016 presidential election season were cast this week in the Iowa caucuses. This is supposed to fill us with happy thoughts about self-government, civic virtue, rational deliberation, and about politics as the way the people’s will is put into effect. But to the contrary, we should spurn what the establishment would
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston on 30 January 2016. Includes an introduction by Jeff Deist.
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.