The Free Market 6, no. 2 (February 1988) The Marxists call it “impressionism”: taking social or economic trends of the last few weeks or months and assuming that they will last forever. The problem is not realizing that there are underlying economic laws at work. Impressionism has always been rampant; and never more so than in public discussion of
The Free Market 6, no. 3 (March 1988) The hottest new topic in mathematics, physics, and allied sciences is “chaos theory.” It is radical in its implications, but no one can accuse its practitioners of being anti- mathematical, since its highly complex math, including advanced computer graphics, is on the cutting edge of mathematical theory. In
[From The Essential von Mises ] Included in The Theory of Money and Credit were at least the rudiments of another magnificent accomplishment of Ludwig von Mises: the long-sought explanation for that mysterious and troubling economic phenomenon—the business cycle. Ever since the development of industry and the advanced market economy in the late
[This article is excerpted from a 30,000-word memo to the Volker Fund, 1961. The full memo is available in Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard edited by David Gordon.] The Road to Civil War The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts: the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession,
[This article is excerpted from Conceived in Liberty , chapter 36, “King George’s War.”] What, in all this time, was happening to Plymouth, the mother colony of all New England? Succinctly, it was rapidly and irretrievably declining. As we have seen, its fur trade had virtually disappeared by 1640. And for the next 20 years, only further decline
Demand calls forth supply in the world of economic journals as much as in the “real” economic world. The proliferation of new journals since World War II has been a function of the increasing number of Ph.D.s and of the acute exigencies of “publish or perish.” But there is another category of new journals more relevant to this one: periodicals
[Chapter 80, “Was the American Revolution Radical?,” from Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty , vol. 4, The Revolutionary War, 1775–1784 .] Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This
As you spend the day with family and friends, we thought you might take some time away from bowl games to enjoy a vintage Rothbard speech that touches on twin themes appropriate to January 1st: reflecting on the past while looking to the future. Filmed on the Stanford University campus at the second Mises University in 1988, he contemplates the
Introduction The Problem of Free Will The False Mechanical Analogies of Scientism The False Organismic Analogies of Scientism Axioms and Deduction Science and Values: Arbitrary Ethics Conclusion: Individualism vs. Collectivism in the Study of Man [Reprinted from Scientism and Values , Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D.
This article was originally published in the Cato Journal 2, No. 1 (Spring 1982): 55–99. Law as a Normative Discipline Physical Invasion Initiation of an Overt Act: Strict Liability The Proper Burden of Risk The Proper Burden of Proof Strict Causality Liability of the Aggressor Only A Theory of Just Property: Homesteading Nuisances, Visible and
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.