May 21 marks the 1983 death of Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher.” He was best known for his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements , which brilliantly analyzed movements that played prominent roles in world events during his lifetime. He identified the allure of a larger, and therefore seemingly ennobling,
Altruism has commonly been held up as the standard for moral behavior, with those claiming to see deviations from altruism commonly condemning the deviants as selfish or greedy. For example, Martin Luther King claimed that “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
May 29 marks the 99th birthday of Arthur Seldon, a prolific defender of freedom against government control. His biography’s subtitle, A Life for Liberty , reveals his animating commitment. Seldon was the editorial director of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs for over three decades. He penned 28 books and monographs and over 200
Government now routinely embraces massive amounts of mud- and blame-slinging as standard operating procedure. The “other guys” are always extremists who exhibit unprincipled intransigence, which prevents agreement on self-defined white hats’ solutions. It illustrates that the government we suffer from is not a means to expanding harmony, but the
In a world of private property rights, where the contracts that derive from those rights must be honored, there would be no controversy about the rights of corporate “stakeholders.” Owners of capital resources pool them and delegate day-to-day control to corporate management as their agents. The only stakeholders those delegated agents agree to
I was going through the textbook for my economics principles course recently, thinking about how I could better reconcile the fact that since only individuals choose, the logic of economics is about individual choices facing the fact of scarcity. Yet macroeconomics is generally presented directly in terms of aggregates and how to control them, as
In recent years, claims that “the rich” don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes have been repeated countless times. But that excuse to tax them more to line others’ pockets is blown away whenever the highly disproportionate income tax burdens borne by higher earners are reported. As The Wall Street Journal titled a recent article ,“Top 20% of
The harm that Britain’s protectionist Navigation Acts imposed on the colonies was a major impetus for the American Revolution. But the United States did not abandon those unjustifiable restrictions. Even before the Bill of Rights was adopted, Congress in 1789 enacted similar protectionist restrictions on coastal shipping. It is centuries past time
In public policy discussions, the words independence and dependence make frequent appearances. Given that American political ideology has in many ways been defined by the Declaration of Independence, Americans naturally think of independence as good and dependence as bad. As a consequence, arguments to implement government policies to reduce our
Americans pay ritual obeisance to liberty. But daily, they say “there ought to be a law” that restricts it. They have only the dimmest awareness of our founders’ views on this central issue and no knowledge of friends of freedom beyond our shores. That is a pity, because such investigation would yield much insight. A good example is Belgian-born
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.