Eric Posner and Gen Weyl claim that economics has become too timid. Posner is an influential law professor at Chicago, and Weyl is a principal researcher at Microsoft. Their article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 6. Their diagnosis of economics is accurate, but their cure is worse than the disease. Economists today, they say,
The Secular Saints: And Why Morals Are Not Just Subjective . By Hunter Lewis. Axios Press, 2018. Vi + 435 pages. Hunter Lewis has set himself a difficult task: he endeavors to explain why morals are not subjective. To understand his project, we must understand what Lewis means by “subjective” and its contrasting term “objective.” Consider the two
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, 2018 To review Skin in the Game is a risky undertaking. The author has little use for book reviewers who, he tells us, “are bad middlemen. Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well-written they are; never in how they map the book (unless of
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian Harvard University Press, 2018 x+381 pages Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Wellesley College, tells us that Globalists “is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against the World Trade organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that ... became
Today would have been Ralph Raico’s eighty-second birthday. He was a foremost historian of classical liberalism and a leading libertarian theorist. He was a member of Murray Rothbard’s legendary Circle Bastiat and one of Murray’s closest friends. Ralph was also my friend for thirty-seven years, and his learning, analytical abilities, and devotion
The distinguished entrepreneur Robert Luddy, a friend and benefactor for many years of the Mises Institute, has extended his innovations in education from elementary and high schools to universities. His Thales Academy has had great success, and he now proposes a Thales College as well. This college will not seek accreditation, in that way cutting
At a recent conference on cybercrime, Judge Richard Posner, a well-known federal appeals court judge and one of the founders of the “law and economics” movement, said that the needs of national security trump a supposed right to privacy. The NSA spying programs should be allowed to proceed unimpeded by the wishes of people to keep their private
This essay is adapted from David Gordon’s talk at the Costa Mesa Mises Circle . Click here to register for January’s Houston Mises Circle. I’m glad to see so many people here who are open-minded to the notion of society without the state. Unfortunately, some people aren’t like you. These people will read about how bad the government is and may
As I read The Executive Unbound , I found myself in a world turned upside down. I take the following to be not only true, but obviously true: Today and in the recent past, all-but-uncheckable presidents have involved us in unneeded wars, invaded our liberties, and subjected us to economic controls that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to fascism.
In “ Libertarianism vs. Liberty ,” published in HuffPost on April27, Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute criticizes libertarians like Ron Paul who support a non-interventionist foreign policy. These evil people do not want to start a war with Iran. How can they fail to see, Schwartz asks, the “incontrovertible fact” of a direct threat to
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.