[This article was originally published on LewRockwell.com in 2003 .] If gold is to be re-monetized, then this must mean that it has been de-monetized. But isn’t gold money? No, gold is not money. It has not been money for Europeans since 1914, when the commercial banks stole it from depositors at the outbreak of World War I, and central banks then
Henry Hazlitt tried to explain economics in one lesson in his famous book . What lesson? The lesson conveyed by Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 analogy of the broken window. This is the lesson of the fallacy of the thing not seen. An economist should always consider what the owner of a broken window would have done with the money that he must now spend to
Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise
Volume 13, Number 2 (1998) One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you. At least two fundamental principles of Western law had their origin in Mosaic Israel. The first principle was the rule of law itself: every resident was to be protected equally by the civil law. The second principle was open
Murray Rothbard was seriously interested in a remarkably large array of topics, one of them being the effects of rival eschatological views during the Progressive era. The period was marked by four major eschatological views: postmillennialism, amillennialism, and the two forms of premillennialism, historic and dispensational (a post-1830
“Coase, get your cattle off my land.” –Walter Block In one sentence, Walter Block called into question Ron Coase’s central conclusion in his now-famous theorem, namely, that the original distribution of ownership would not affect the allocation of scarce resources in a free market, if there were no transaction costs. Volume 16, Number 4 (2002)
Every once in a while, I see a car bearing bumper sticker, “Buy American.” From what I gather, it is a popular sticker in Michigan, especially in cities like Detroit and Pontiac. “Americans have to pull together,” we are told. “They ought to help each other. If they don’t stop buying those foreign imports, they’re going to kill the U.S. economy.”
Prime Minister May says that she has reached an agreement with the European Union. The agreement is 585 pages long. Every time politicians vote to implement a 600-page document that was written by high-level bureaucrats, the liberties of the citizens of that nation decline. The devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details for the devil
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.