In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State . By Charles Murray. The AEI Press, 2006. Xv + 214 pgs. Charles Murray, by his own account, should not have written In Our Hands . He identifies a genuine problem; but he himself shows that his plan to solve it is either useless or inferior to a better plan. Government programs spend billions of
[This article is a revised and expanded version of a talk given at the Mises Circle in Costa Mesa, California, on May 6, 2006, which you can listen to here .] America is today embroiled in a futile, costly, and immoral war. Domestically, deficit spending is out of control, and new revelations about telephone spying by the National Security
Introduction The German Historical School Franz Brentano Menger and Böhm-Bawerk Deductive Science Bibliographical Essay Bibliography Notes The Austrian School of economics arose in opposition to the German Historical School; and Carl Menger developed his methodological views in combat with the rival group. I thus wish first to discuss the
In a series of posts to an Internet discussion group several years ago, David Friedman severely criticized Murray Rothbard’s account of Adam Smith in his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Edward Elgar , 1995). These comments have enjoyed wide circulation, and various posters to the Mises Institute Blog have referred to them. For that reason, I
Matt Zwolinski, a libertarian political philosopher and the founder of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, has a surprising proposal. Libertarians, he suggests, should drop the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) . The NAP holds that “aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of
Through the Oral History Project, the Mises Institute is preserving the personal recollections and wisdom of the great men and women of our movement for the students and scholars of the future. Mises Institute faculty sat down this year to discuss the past and the future with champions of the Austrian tradition including economist Leland B. Yeager
[ At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge? By John R, Lott, Jr. Regnery, 2013. Xvi + 320 pages. Book review by David Gordon.] John Lott is best known to the public for his outstanding analysis of gun control legislation, but his research as an economist extends far beyond that topic; and he here gives us a devastating account that covers
Those of us who favor the free market must confront a problem. The virtues of the market, and the vices of socialism and interventionism, have been made incontestably clear by Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, and others. The case for the free market, as these great figures explain it, can readily be grasped and demands no esoteric knowledge. Yet many
Why write an article on a subject you know nothing about? This is a question that Amia Srinivasan might usefully have asked herself. She is a Prize Fellow in philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford, one of the most prestigious academic positions in the academic world; and her webpage at Oxford includes several papers of outstanding merit. You
Jason Brennan has in posts at Bleeding Heart Libertarians rendered a great service to supporters of a priori economics in the style of Mises and Rothbard, though this is far from his aim. To the contrary, he endeavors to show that a priori economics is untenable. He recounts a conversation with someone he calls “Austrian Dude.” Brennan asked
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.