An argument that is often used to support government intervention relies on “negative externalities.” People’s behavior, it is claimed, sometimes generates avoidable costs for others in this way: you do something in order to gain an advantage over someone else. But that person may try to do the same thing to you. Even if he doesn’t, he will at
[ Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World . By Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell. Regnery Publishing, 2019. 192 pages.] Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are well-known free market economists, and they do not look with favor on a disturbing trend among American young people. “In the spring of 2016,” they tell us,
[ The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society . By Binyamin Appelbaum. Little, Brown, 2019. 439 pages.] Binyamin Appelbaum is unhappy. He is the main writer on economics for The New York Times , and he thinks that economics has taken a wrong turn. In the first half of the twentieth century, economics was
W hen Murray Rothbard founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977, he wrote an editorial for the first issue. In it, he said, “The Journal of Libertarian Studies has been founded not simply to provide an outlet for scholarship and research that may be unpopular in a particular discipline. It is the belief that there is a new and growing
People are unequal in abilities and circumstances, and because of this, attempts to make them equal by force will inevitably violate their rights to live in freedom. If people have rights, unequal outcomes will result and trying to impose equality will violate their rights. It is as simple as that. Murray Rothbard in Egalitarianism as a Revolt
Yesterday afternoon, Butler Shaffer , one of the great pioneers of the libertarian movement, passed away, two weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday. In a column written in December 2014, he tells us, “My interest in what is now called ‘libertarian’ thinking was kindled in college in the late 1950s. There was no coherent philosophy by that name in
Prosperity & Liberty: What Venezuela Needs . Edited by Rafael Acevedo. Econintech, 2019. Rafael Acevedo is a distinguished Venezuelan economist, now in part-time residence at Texas Tech University, who is deeply concerned about the future of his native country. Socialism has brought Venezuela to rack and ruin, and if the country is to recover, a
An influential line of thought in contemporary political philosophy began well but quickly got off track. The line of thought began as a criticism of Isaiah Berlin. In his famous paper, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin set forward a notion of “negative freedom” that libertarians will find familiar: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to
We usually think of Friedrich Hayek as a moderate, as least when compared with Mises and Rothbard, but he had a radical side as well. Hidden away in a note to the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty , he makes a comment that puts him far outside “respectable” public opinion. He says that the inventor of “freedom from want” was “the
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Robert Nozick argues that If people benefit you by their activities, you have no obligation to pay them for what you have gained. Nozick provides a well-known example to illustrate this point: “Suppose some of the people in your neighborhood (there are 364 other adults) have found a public address system and decide
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.