The progressive intellectual looks upon capitalism as the most ghastly of all evils. Mankind, he contends, lived rather happily in the good old days. But then, as a British historian said, the Industrial Revolution “fell like a war or a plague” on the peoples. The “bourgeoisie” converted plenty into scarcity. A few tycoons enjoy all luxuries. But,
My most memorable high school experience occurred on the first day of my senior year. I was sitting in an Advanced Placement US Government class when the teacher posed a simple question to the students. It was a question intended to set the course in motion, and get us fledgling statecraft scholars thinking. The question was, “what is government
[ This article is part of a series of occasional posts which will explore the immense treasure trove of unpublished papers, lectures, memos, correspondence, and notes in the Rothbard Archives at the Mises Institute. ] In 1961, F. A. Harper of the William Volker Fund, and later the founder and president of the Institute for Humane Studies, asked
Another week of Trump monopolizing the news cycle, first with a typo and then by exiting the Obama administration’s Paris Climate Agreement. Rejecting the international agreement is not only a victory for American self-determination , but will improve the lives of the billions who were going to bear the real costs of another layer of government
Tennessee Promise, and now Tennessee Reconnect, are the first programs of their kind in the United States. Through these programs designed by now gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd, the state will pay tuition for all that seek an associates degree from a community college. They are everything that progressives like Bernie Sanders have wanted for
Janet Yellen didn’t make much news this week when she testified before the House and Senate banking committees. She continued to defend the Fed’s low interest rate policy , painted a very optimistic picture of the American economy, and struggled to defend her opposition to Audit the Fed . Unfortunately for Yellen, while she can duck and dodge the
The US higher-education world has been rocked the last two years by student protests, “free-speech” controversies, and allegations of faculty misconduct at schools as diverse as Missouri , Yale , Middlebury , Berkeley , and Evergreen State College . You’ve all heard about safe spaces, microaggressions, intersectionality, snowflakes, claims that
The late economist Friedrich Hayek, celebrated earlier this week on the anniversary of his birthday, left an enduring body of work and a place in history as the reluctant winner of a Nobel Prize he thought suited only to the physical sciences. But exactly how enduring his work and his legacy will remain is an important question, and not just for
The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process “flawed,” “superficial,” “extremely time-consuming,” and “sort of a low bar.” So he’s
An audio version of this Mises Wire is available here . The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully
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.