No ideas are more powerful to the cause of freedom than the truth about economics, which is at the heart of the Misesian and Rothbardian traditions. Our mission for the past forty-two years has been to spread these truths as far and wide as possible. We would be much farther down the road to serfdom without the Mises Institute.
For several decades, I have considered the Mises Institute my Mecca. Every year, I made a pilgrimage to Auburn to spend a week teaching at Mises University, the world’s preeminent program in Austrian School economics. As of 2024, more than 4,750 students have graduated from Mises University. This past July, thirteen of the eighteen faculty members were themselves Mises University alumni! The new generation of Austrian thinkers is taking the helm. Does Mises University make a difference? Absolutely!
Over one hundred students learned about competition, value and utility, money and banking, business cycles, entrepreneurship, economic method, economic history, and financial economics. My contribution was The Axis of Evil: America’s Three Worst Presidents.
The students were excited over the appearance of our mystery speaker, Dr. Ron Paul, who gave a one-hour presentation and stood for pictures with every student. Our special guest speaker, Dr. Robert Malone, was also a big hit. In early July, Dr. Malone unbeknownst to us published long reviews of What Has Government Done to Our Money? and Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard on his Substack column, which has over half a million readers! As soon as we learned about these reviews, we invited him to speak at Mises University. Dr. Malone is the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, and he was one of the truth tellers who was punished during the covid years by the enemies of free speech (a.k.a. the federal government and its sock puppets in the media and Big Tech). As he explained in his reviews, Austrian and Rothbardian economics showed him why covid tyranny occurred and why a similar event is likely to occur again. As of this writing, Dr. Malone’s speech at Mises University has 1.5 million views!
My second annual pilgrimage over the years was to the Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC), held every March. It’s hard to state how important this event has been to the Austrian School and the freedom movement in general. This is where the best new scholarship in Austrian economics is discussed and debated year after year by scholars worldwide. It is an annual intellectual feast and a crucial networking event for scholars working in the Austrian tradition.
An exciting addition for 2025 will be the resurrection of the Libertarian Scholars Conference, to be held the day before AERC. There will be scholars of history, political science, philosophy, and economics in attendance. This interdisciplinary alliance will produce significant future advances in the literature of liberty.
The twenty-fifth Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) was held this summer. Graduate students interested in a deeper understanding of Austrian economics delved into Human Action with lectures and discussions led by Mises Institute faculty and associated scholars. Their experience at RGS will influence their coursework, their theses and dissertations, and likely their career choices.
It was a great pleasure to host our Fellows in Residence this summer. Our Fellows worked on their research, honed their presentation skills, and made ample use of all the resources and assistance that the Mises Institute and its scholars could provide them. Their final research papers—all of which are high quality and ready to be published in academic journals—will boost their careers as young Austrian School scholars.
This year, our Mises Apprentices were quite prolific as well. They published sixty-five articles on the Mises Wire, and several of them ranked among our most widely read articles of the entire year. Many were even republished on websites such as ZeroHedge. Our Apprentices also created content for Instagram and X, with one video on X garnering over 100,000 views in a few days. The Apprentices learned essential skills to help them reach the younger generation with the Misesian and Rothbardian message of truth in economics.
Mises.org continues to be the best economics education website in the world, bar none. In the past twelve months, there were 3,060,461 unique visitors to mises.org. We uploaded 314 videos on YouTube resulting in 4,061,299 views. The PDF of Ludwig von Mises’s great treatise, Human Action, was downloaded 782,400 times, and the PDF of his Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow was downloaded 124,476 times.
As of this writing, it’s only been two weeks since we released our new documentary, Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve, and it already has more than 69,000 views. By comparison, the 1995 Mises Institute documentary on the Fed averaged about 65,000 views annually.
Our Beginners videos series on economics had over 8 million views in the past twenty-four months. The Misesian goes out to 17,000 Members, donors, and students; and the Mises Digest is received by another 33,000.
Thanks to our generous donors, we have given away more than 70,000 copies of Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money? this year.
Our podcasts are increasingly popular as well. We use alternative media platforms to avoid censorship by fascist Big Tech, and The Human Action Podcast, Minor Issues, and Radio Rothbard all have loyal audiences in the thousands. We recently launched two new podcasts, Loot and Lobby and Guns and Butter.
In May, we commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of Human Action with a two-day conference. Each attendee was given a special leather-bound edition of Human Action with a new introduction by Joe Salerno. The fifteen scholarly papers presented at the conference will soon be published as a book. We hope they will be a source of ideas and inspiration for Austrian scholars.
And, of course, we continue to publish our scholarly journals, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which feature all the best new scholarship in the Misesian and Rothbardian traditions.
Our Mises Circle events in Tampa, Florida; Lake Jackson, Texas (cosponsored by the Ron Paul Institute); Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Fort Myers, Florida, were well attended. The Tampa Circle is scheduled again for February 2025. These events and the new Mises Book Clubs around the country are introducing our programs to a broader audience and are a source of new Members.
Along with my colleagues Wanjiru Njoya, Jonathan Newman, and Mark Thornton, I did dozens of radio talk show and television interviews in the past three months, some of which were on national television and on radio networks that broadcast on hundreds of stations simultaneously. Topics ranged from the Fed to so-called DEI to the economic issues of the presidential campaign to the Mises Institute’s programs. More of our scholars will be taking to the airwaves in the coming months. Those of us who have already done interviews are being invited back to speak again. It’s high time that the neocon-progressive blockade of the airwaves was broken up!
Our major publicity coup was our full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, which was made possible by a generous donor and was published on June 24, entitled “Who Needs the Fed?” We don’t, of course, but the bureaucratic welfare-warfare state’s plotters, planners, parasites, propagandists, and plutocrats seem to like it.
The Mises Institute’s programs strive to teach anyone and everyone of all ages the truth about economics—to help them become their own economists without being infected by the statist biases of the educational establishment, the legacy media, and popular culture. We like to think of ourselves as standing on the shoulders of great men like Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, and Ron Paul, who devoted their adult lives to the relentless pursuit of the truth about the economy and society and the evils of the state. Intellectual ammunition must constantly be replenished in the war of ideas, for only ideas—or “idea bombs,” if you will—can defeat tyranny.
We are on the precipice of an avalanche of tyranny, with establishment figures such as Hillary Clinton calling for the imprisonment of the critics of statism, the spreaders of what she calls “disinformation.” Law school deans are calling for the abolition not just of the First and Second Amendments, but of all of what’s left of the US Constitution to establish a socialist dictatorship in America once and for all. They’ve targeted the Supreme Court for court packing and the abolition of the Electoral College so that New York and California “progressives” can choose all the presidents. They also want to sneak in Soviet-style central planning with their “Green New Deal.” They want to abolish merit in hiring and force quota hiring of their political mascot groups to solidify their monopoly of political power even further.
This road to serfdom has been paved by decades of indoctrination of college students with the socialist propaganda line that only “the oppressed” deserve freedom of speech, which is why students think they are taking the moral high road by screaming and yelling and rioting whenever, say, an antiestablishment speaker or a Mises Institute scholar, is invited to speak on their campuses. In the old days, campus Marxists considered the economically educated the tools of capitalism. Today we are the tools of the oppressor class.
As Mises wrote in Human Action, the good news is that there has always been a remnant of young people who are not bamboozled by statist indoctrination and who want to live in freedom. They don’t want their lives to be controlled by egomaniacal nitwit politicians in faraway Washington, DC. The totalitarians who are so dominant in American society today are scared to death of our antitotalitarian ideas, as they should be. That’s why universities, the media, and certainly the government are so heavily invested in the mechanics of censorship, “canceling,” endless lying and spreading of propaganda, and character assassination. They have no life-affirming philosophy, so they use intimidation, coercion, lies, and violence to try to force the rest of us to adhere to their bizarre, anticivilization whims and fancies.
They react to our ideas like a vampire reacts to a cross, stammering and stuttering and calling us vile names. The state consists mostly of cowards and bullies who have always been intimidated by powerful ideas—the ideas of freedom and of deep suspicion of the state and everything that it does. That is why they strive to get our children into their clutches at younger and younger ages. We refuse to sit idly by.
Mises’s message is powerful. It’s little wonder that UFC fighter Renato Moicano grabbed the mic from Joe Rogan after his cage-fighting victory in July to say “If you care about your country . . . read Ludwig von Mises!” We immediately sent him a small library of books on Austrian economics.
With your support, we will carry on our teaching, outreach, research, and publishing. We won’t stop educating the future champions of freedom. Your donations matter, and you matter. We are in this together, “this” being nothing less than the battle to save Western civilization from the latest onslaught of socialist tyranny.
Please contribute whatever you can to help make the Mises Institute more influential in 2025. Thank you for your support and for being a soldier in the war of ideas.
