Mises Wire

Ryan McMaken and Heather Carson discuss how homeschooling is a way to resist and sabotage the many ways the state centralizes power and destroys private institutions. 

African nations such as Nigeria and Kenya desperately need market economies and freedom from the socialism and statism that infects the governing elite of that continent.

California politicians are in a state of denial as deadly wildfires burn out of control throughout the state, the latest being in Los Angeles. Their denialism in the face of real facts shows that California politically has become La-La Land.

Protectionist tariff taxes are nothing more than a price-fixing conspiracy orchestrated by the state that enriches a relatively small group of politically connected corporations.

Making it harder to do business with Americans is not the way to help domestic workers, small businesses, and everyone else in middle America who has been getting ripped off under our current political system.

When it seemed central Europe would succumb to the terrors of Bolshevism, Ludwig von Mises wrote his classic book, Socialism, convincing fellow Austrians that socialism was destructive. Mises influenced F.A. Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom had similar effects in the US.

No matter how the court rules on birthright citizenship (or anything else), it certainly won’t be the “last word” on the matter, and nothing is decided beyond the short term. 

Despite efforts by elites to promote state-sponsored education, people are revolting against the statist model. From private schools to home schooling and other alternatives, people have not forgotten that liberty and learning fit well together.

How should we approach the study of history? An unfortunate trend has been to implement “history by theory” in which practitioners take theories and present them as facts. An honest approach is to take the historical facts and interpret them through coherent theories.

In the 1870s and 1880s, and through the 1920s, it's clear that many legislators and judges did not agree that birthright citizenship applied to everyone born in the borders of the US. The modern interpretation is highly debatable.