Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: he considers, as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante,
The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old age, and it won't guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is fully capable of awful screw-ups. But both theory and practice indicate that its screw-ups are less pervasive and more easily corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.
What set in motion the explosive technological advance of the last 250 years was the world of ideas. Great thinkers began to understand the internal logic of the market economy and its potential for liberating mankind from poverty, dependency, and despotic rule.
Wilhelm Röpke made it his life's work to help construct and defend the free society, to diagnose the ills of capitalism, and to suggest concrete solutions. Röpke was never shy about criticizing the abuses of the body politic which endangered its health and rendered it defenseless against infections from the far Right and far Left. Röpke favored untrammeled free trade, regional liberties, and respect for traditional peoples and ways of life.
Professor Kirzner’s outstanding book "aims to present, in briefest outline ... the story of Mises in his role of economist" (emphasis removed). In this task, it is eminently successful.
John Locke's great Second Treatise of Government was the decisive influence on the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Here are crucial excerpts.
Tucker was the voice for individualist anarchism in the late 19th century, and J. William Lloyd was his follower. This essay is from the Lloyd papers, now part of the Mises Institute archives.
In ancient times, moderation meant eschewing vice and embracing virtue. Now it means doing whatever seems expedient. Tibor R. Machan explains.
There are no good American history textbooks on the market. I've looked. We non-leftists have to settle for the least bad one we can find. A number of my friends told me a year ago that Tindall and Shi's America: A Narrative History was the least bad. So, I've used it this semester for my survey course covering the period from Reconstruction to the present.
For some, Popper is the most overrated intellectual of the century. For others, he is the overlooked genius. Rafe Champion, while correcting the new Popper biography, explains who the man was and what he did.
