If you missed it, Forbes recently reported that a college ranking organization has named the Mises Institute as the #9 most influential think tank in the United States — out of nearly 2,000 organizations!
All of the other top 10 organizations — among them the neocon American Enterprise Institute, the Fed-loving Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute — have budgets and staffs vastly larger than ours. Yet our web traffic, name ID, reputation, and influence rival the biggest Beltway outfits.
Here’s what Forbes had to say:
In addition to the superb collection of scholarly books and studies in the Austrian tradition, especially by Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and their disciples, Mises Institute sometimes releases provocative articles, defying political correctness and attracting wide readership. This increases its social media impact, but who is to say that think tanks were only created to influence the academic and policy elites?
As blogger Ryan Griggs puts it:
the Mises Institute is the “top pound for pound — or influence per dollar of revenue — educational and research institution in the country. … Simply put, Mises does more with less than all the rest.”
Of course the Mises Institute is not really a think tank at all. We’re not interested in “public policy,” we don’t provide intellectual cover for dubious legislation, we don’t court one faction or another in Congress, and we surely don’t support parties or candidates.
But if you’re reading this, you’re likely already familiar with the Mises Institute and what we do. That’s why we’re asking for your help. We need you to join us as a member, to consider donating, and to ask as many liberty-minded friends and family to do the same.
With an election year looming, our mission of winning hearts and minds is increasingly urgent. The 2016 presidential race is already a horror show, filled with statist platitudes, divisive rhetoric, warmongering, and mind-numbing repetitions of economic fallacies.
You know there’s a better way. America doesn’t need a central state, it doesn’t need a central bank, it doesn’t need a political class, and in fact it doesn’t need politics at all. It certainly doesn’t need an endless election season. What it needs is the peaceful and cooperative power of an unleashed market economy, coupled with a commitment to nonintervention in the affairs of other nations.
Will you help the Mises Institute stand as an intellectual counter to the political rhetoric and the false Left/Right dichotomy? Is there a single organization better suited to use the 2016 election as a platform to call for the rejection of politics as the means of organizing society?
That’s why we’re asking you to join us as a member if you haven’t already, and to help us enlist as many new members as possible in the coming year. It’s only $60 a year — ($5 a month!) and the benefits are tangible:
- Join a Community. Join us and become part of the Austro-libertarian intellectual revolution taking hold around the world. Your membership puts you at the forefront as a radical and uncompromising advocate for Austrian economics and liberty: pro-market, pro-peace, anti-state, anti-Fed, anti-PC. And many of our members make professional contacts and lifelong friends through the Institute.
- Amplify Your Voice. Our website, live events, and academic conferences reach more than 4 million people every year. By engaging with the Mises Institute, the diffuse voices of libertarians around the world are concentrated, focused, and amplified.
- Arm Yourself Intellectually. Our daily articles, blog, social media feeds, and videos provide you with a steady source of Austrian and libertarian content to demolish progressive myths and interventionist disinformation. Our online library of foundational books — by giants like Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe — is the biggest and best source for Austrian and libertarian literature in the world. Mises.org provides millions of people with a lifetime of free learning at their fingertips.
- Defy the State. More than anything, the state seeks to dumb us down and force young people into schools that are hostile to liberty and market economics. Mises University, Mises Academy, and our high school seminars teach thousands of students from around the world real economics, real history, and real philosophy. Those students tell us their lives changed forever by attending Mises Institute events, and they’re now deployed in business, academia, Wall Street, and the tech world. There’s nothing like our week-long Mises University available anywhere else, and it’s our most important program.
Thank you for being engaged with the Mises Institute in 2015, and for having the courage to challenge the groupthink and distractions of our day. Every visit to mises.org, every new social media follower, every shared link, every person at our events, every new member, and every dollar helps us promote Austrian economics, freedom, and peace.
Please join us!
