High oil prices are a symptom of economic and monetary imbalances, not just a consequence of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decisions. Throughout history, we have seen how OPEC cuts have done little to elevate prices when diversification and technology added to rising efficiency. Likewise, OPEC output increases do not
One of the realities that nullifies persistent interpretations of the European colonization of the Americas as a cataclysm of subjugation is the existence of state exploitation in the precontact New World. As I have recently shown , many common Indians lived in banal slavery to a political class—the same servitude that every “citizen” of a state
Throughout the corona “pandemic” the Holy Grail of public health officials has been vaccination: only by vaccinating enough people—first the elderly and infirm, then all adults, and now even children—can the nefarious virus be beaten. As vaccination has proven less than wholly successful in preventing the spread of coronavirus, with studies
Abstract: The paper describes the colonization cost theory of anarchic emergence. The theory states that when the state incurs high costs of directly colonizing land, it may be beneficial for it to allow anarchy to emerge and settle distant frontiers. Once enough land is settled by the anarchic community, the state can then use one of the two
Market reforms in Africa can be thwarted because of propaganda asserting that markets are a Western import. Notwithstanding the currency of this belief, it is patently absurd. Markets flourished in Africa prior to colonialism, and wherever they are repressed, the result is social immiseration, as economist William Hutt points out in
In discussions surrounding of the world’s monetary systems today there is usually one thing almost everyone can agree on: that money should be controlled by the organizations we call “states” or “ sovereign states .” Nowadays when we say “the US dollar” we mean the currency issued by the US government. When we say “the British pound” we mean the
Murray Rothbard views the eighteenth-century French economist and administrator Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot as a great and admirable figure, but David Graeber and David Wengrow do not agree. In their recently published The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), they present Turgot as a force for evil. His ideas provided a
Review of Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) The Roman Empire is often presented as the fabric of Western civilization. The languages, laws, religion, mores, and implements of the Western political imaginary come in large part, in one way or another,
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. In Man, Economy, and State , Murray Rothbard expounds the principles of economics by reconstructing an economy from the ground up. Following the practice of classical economists, he opens the book by imagining Robinson Crusoe alone on an island. After identifying the operative laws that
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The notion that Americans will always be free is part of the catechism that is force-fed to public school students. For hundreds of years, philosophers, politicians, and reformers have touted a law of history that assures the ultimate triumph of freedom. “Oppressed people cannot remain
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.