Libertarians think that taxation is theft. The government takes away part of your income and property by force. Your payments aren’t voluntary. If you think they are, try to withhold payment and see what happens. An influential book by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership , tries to show that this view of taxation is wrong. Many
[ The Vanishing Tradition: Perspective on American Conservatism . Edited by Paul Gottfried. Cornell University Press, 2020. 223 + pages.] Paul Gottfried’s excellent anthology of essays on American conservatives chronicles a key phenomenon of our times. Understanding it is important not only for those, like Gottfried and his contributors, who are
Sometimes the government passes laws that restrict people for what it claims to be their own good, such as laws that ban drugs that are supposed to be bad for your health. Laws like this are called “paternalistic.” Libertarians oppose paternalism, but it is not only libertarians who reject it. It is at odds with the whole tradition of classical
The most famous work of twentieth-century political philosophy is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). The most controversial part of this book is the “difference principle”: “Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of
Can a Roman Catholic be an Austro-Libertarian as well? Christopher Ferrara in a book called The Church and the Libertarian says that one cannot. In Ferrara’s view, Austrian economists deny that the moral law applies to the economy. Instead, Austrians say, strictly scientific laws govern the economy and these limit what the State or the Church can
[ Conceived in Liberty: The New Republic, 1784–1791 . By Murray N. Rothbard. Edited by Patrick Newman. Mises Institute, 2019. 332 pages.] We owe Patrick Newman a great debt for his enterprise and editorial skill in bringing to publication the fifth volume, hitherto thought lost, of Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty . The details of his rescue
President Trump’s pardon of Michael Milken would have delighted Murray Rothbard. Milken, who was famous for his “junk-bond” takeovers of various companies, served twenty-two months in prison for federal crimes that involved market trading. Murray Rothbard thought that Milken was a hero. As he explained in an article written in 1989: During the
Susan Neiman is a philosopher who has written well-regarded books on Kant and on the problem of evil. Last year she published a book with an unusual title: Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Neiman lives in Berlin and directs the Einstein Forum. She is interested in how Germans deal with the crimes of the Nazi era. In her
In The Poverty of Historicism (1957), the great philosopher of science Karl Popper claims, “I have shown that, for strictly logical reasons, it is impossible for us to predict the future course of human history.” By showing this, Popper thought he had fatally wounded Marxism and other varieties of what he calls “historicism.” As Popper uses the
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fourth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors
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.