In an article published last week , I reviewed, in not altogether favorable terms, Stefan Molyneux’s book Universally Preferable Behavior . This review has aroused many of the author’s numerous admirers to sound and fury: never in my long experience as a reviewer have I encountered anything to match it. Molyneux has now himself joined the fray. He
[ Free Market , May 2012. You can subscribe by becoming a member .] In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 3, 2012, President Obama called a budget proposal of his Republican opponents in Congress “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” What did the president mean by this comment? The budget proposal in question, he claimed,
[ Robert Nozick . By Ralf M. Bader. Continuum, 2010. Xii + 136 pages] Ralf Bader has given us an excellent guidebook to Anarchy, State, and Utopia , but he has done much more than this. He offers insightful arguments of his own, often in defense of Nozick against his nonlibertarian critics. His book is a major advance in libertarian political
[ Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow . By Peter J. Boettke. Independent Institute — Universidad Francisco Marroquin. xx + 435 pages] This notable book collects 22 articles by Peter Boettke; 8 of these have been written in collaboration with others, including Peter Leeson, Christopher Coyne, Steve Horwitz, David Prychitko, and
[ The Rule of Law and the Measure of Property • By Jeremy Waldron • Cambridge University Press, 2012 • xiv + 118 pages] Classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek and Richard Epstein have often claimed that the rule of law imposes strong constraints on the state’s regulation of private property. If they are right, this would be a very effective
Although Leland Yeager calls himself a fellow traveler of the Austrian School (p. 100), rather than a full-fledged member of it — he is a fellow traveler of the Chicago School as well — no reader of his essays can fail to note one respect in which he resembles two quintessential Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard . Like
[ Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government • By Thomas J. DiLorenzo • Mises Institute, 2012 • xi + 219 pages] Thomas DiLorenzo is probably best known to the public for his revisionist studies of Lincoln, but he has a wide range of economic and historical interests. Organized Crime , a collection of 52 short articles by him, shows
Max Keiser, in pursuit of his efforts to show that Mises lapsed into error in monetary theory owing to his deviations from Menger, has recently posted “Menger and Mises: The Essential Difference.” The post is credited to “adamsmith1684”; whether this is Keiser himself I do not know. To complicate matters, the post begins with a quotation from
A specter is haunting Robert Frank’s latest book — the specter of libertarianism. For him, it is a doctrinaire view with little to recommend it; yet he again and again seems drawn both to try to refute it and to deflect it. Libertarianism he takes to be wrong; but even those who accept it, he thinks, ought to see that his proposals for progressive
Murray Rothbard regarded Ronald Hamowy as the funniest person he had ever known, and when I met him in 1979, it was easy to see why. Once in a bookstore near UC Berkeley, he paid for a book by credit card, which wasn’t then as common as it is today. The sales clerk said, “This is all right, but personally I just use credit cards in emergencies.”
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.