Mises Wire

Nicholas Maduro is far from having surrendered his power after the latest elections.

Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.

A gastropub named after Murray Rothbard has opened in Westport, Connecticut.

We've been told that with enough data, we can use sophisticated computing methods to predict the future. That often works with the physical sciences, but predicting human action is something else altogether.

A paper written by Zachary Feinstein discussing the economic consequences of blowing up the Death Star has been making the rounds on social media.

Joseph Schumpeter famously predicted that capitalist society would be destroyed by its own success, and the recent student protests around the US are a sign he may have been right.

Government failure was being felt everywhere this week, from the massive law-enforcement failure in Sen Bernardino to the crumbling economy in Brazil. Meanwhile, government tells us it only needs a little more money, power, and time to solve all problems.

As the economy worsens, the Brazilian Congress this week announced that it will impeach the president of Brazil. Unfortunately, impeaching President Dilma Rousseff by itself will do little to fix Brazil’s economy when Brazilian politics remains dominated by anti-market forces.

Libertarian strategy has always been a vexing topic. Presidential election years, filled with statist campaign rhetoric, tend to cause existential pain and a reexamination of the fundamental question before us: What must be done to reduce the size and scope of the state? How can we realistically create a more libertarian society here and now, given the resources available and the range of tactical options? Is our primary task intellectual, with the goal of converting academic, financial, and political elites to our point of view? Or is a bottom-up strategy superior, one that focuses on populist messages and grassroots political activism?

Is our fight intellectual or populist?

Murray Rothbard addressed both of these approaches in a decidedly un-PC essay written in 1992, an election year that presented libertarians with many of the same issues faced today. He discusses the goal of influencing elite thinkers, a process he termed “Hayekian conversion,” and contrasts it with the goal of reaching the masses through populist messaging.