Utopia is described as a society void of pain and poverty. It was sought well before Sir Thomas More coined the word in 1516 from the Greek words ou and topos . Since their combination translates as “to place,” More understood it to be unattainable. It has many names: Datong, the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and New Jerusalem. For many, utopia
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. If you were to browse the economics section of the majority of bookstores here in my home city, Dublin, you would find something of an odd phenomenon: these businesses which essentially exist because of free enterprise and voluntary exchange—i.e., because of capitalism—stock very few
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. In his 2011 book On Russia , former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger used the ancient Chinese game of Weiqi , or Go , as it is also commonly known, as an extended metaphor to conceptualize and explain the decisions of the Chinese regime in both foreign and domestic policy. A game
Last month, British black studies professor Kehinde Andrews argued that the British Empire was “far worse than the Nazis.” It was a controversial comparison to be sure, but it raises the question: Compared to other expansionist regimes, how bad was the British Empire? A survey of the evidence suggests that the British Empire was relatively less
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden University of Chicago Press, 2020 xvii + 227 pages McCloskey and Carden endeavor to explain one of the most striking facts of world history. Since about 1800, there has been an enormous increase in the average standard of
Nathan Robinson is an erudite socialist who frequently argues for the superiority of socialism over capitalism. He is the editor of Current Affairs and is the author of Why You Should Be a Socialist (All Points Books, 2019). He’s made quite a lucrative career out of pushing for socialism. More specifically, he argues that socialism outperforms
Hans-Hermann Hoppe has argued that monarchies take a longer-term view of their national economies and therefore are more likely to pursue more stable and secure economies. That is, among monarchs, the desire to maximize wealth promotes more farsightedness than exists in democratic regimes. Due to the lower time preference of monarchs, they are
[Originally published April 4, 2006, at LewRockwell.com] “You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.” Thus ends a long passage of a letter from John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Lord
Modern-day race theories—much like the standard racist theories of the past—assume that racial solidarity ought to be the overriding factor in all human behavior. Whites are supposed to always ally with whites. Meanwhile, blacks are supposed to always side with other blacks, even if this means abandoning self-interest. Experience suggests,
[ Editor’s note: In this selection from The Society of Tomorrow , Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) discusses how competition in the political and natural worlds differ greatly from competition in the marketplace. We find Molinari makes some observations similar to those of Ludwig von Mises in identifying the consumer as the ultimate arbiter of who
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.