In my article of February 21, I discussed Susan Neiman’s important book, Learning From the Germans . She maintains that, owing to the crimes of the Nazis, Germans have a moral obligation to “work through” the past. They must acknowledge their responsibility for these crimes, even if they themselves had nothing to do with them. In like fashion,
In Human Action , Mises states a principle that a number of students of Austrian economics dislike. In the years I have taught Human Action at the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, the same objection to Mises’s principle often comes up. It is a valuable objection to discuss in a column about philosophy, because it rests on a logical fallacy. What is the
Today is Hans Hoppe’s birthday. He is an outstanding libertarian theorist, in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, and his strikingly original work ranges widely over philosophy, history, and economics. Among his many contributions are a defense of self-ownership and property rights through argumentation ethics and a trenchant criticism of
Today would have been Joey Rothbard’s 91st birthday. She was Murray Rothbard’s “indispensable framework.” She was a scholar in her own right, but she devoted her life to helping Murray. She was a wonderful friend, and I miss her very
Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War Lindsey A. O’Rourke Cornell University Press, 2018 330 pages Lindsey O’Rourke has given us a devastating indictment of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War and after. O’Rourke, who teaches political science at Boston College, is not a principled non-interventionist in the
In a recent article in The Claremont Review of Books , Michael Anton says that conventional conservatism does not appeal to American youth. “It’s been evident for a while, at least to me, that conventional conservatism no longer holds much purchase with large swaths of the under 40, and especially under 30, crowd. Tax cuts, deregulation, trade
Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external
Last week I discussed a new argument against paternalism in the important book of Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, Escaping Paternalism . Today I’d like to give the other side a chance. Robert H. Frank is an economist at Cornell University, well regarded for his work on the emotions and usually anxious to stress the flaws of the free market. In his
Those who us who accept self-ownership and a Lockean account of property acquisition must face an important objection. In this account, self-owners occupy land and other natural resources, in that way acquiring exclusive rights to the land or resources. Once they done so, they may transfer their titles to the property they have acquired through
Eric Nelson, a Professor Government at Harvard, has published this year a brilliant and imaginative book, The Theology of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019). Nelson, it should be said, is no leftist, despite what you might expect from his Harvard affiliation. To the contrary, he is a conservative and favors, though not to the fullest
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.