G.A. Cohen, who retired last year from Oxford, died on August 5. Although he was a Marxist, he took libertarian ideas with great seriousness; and his efforts to come to grips with the self-ownership principle merit careful study. I rate him one of the best philosophers of the past fifty years. He was extraordinarily sharp in argument but, at least
Today’s is Joe Salerno’s birthday. He is an outstanding Austrian economist and the Academic Vice-President of the Mises Institute. Murray Rothbard said of Joe that he “has done remarkably creative work in the history of economic thought.”He has made major contribution to monetary theory, Austrian business cycle theory, the nature of
Mario Rizzo, a well-known Austrian economist who teaches at NYU, made an important point about Austrian economics in a recent post on Facebook. He said, “If you are an economist and want to be remembered by future generations, then you really should be a Austrian. We pay full homage to our ancestors and do not pretend that we discovered something
Most often the state compels you to do things, not because these things are supposed to be good for you, but because they fulfill the state’s purposes. The state doesn’t take your money to help you. Sometimes, though, the state does pass laws that claim to restrict people for their own good, e.g., laws that forbid use of certain drugs that are
Daniel Hausman is an influential philosopher of economics, and in a recent interview in the New York Times, he has much to say that will be of interest to Austrians. He agrees with Austrians that economists cannot predict particular events: “Scientists (and I include economists) are not fortunetellers.” His reason for holding this view. though,
Nietzsche’s Great Politics . By Hugo Drochon. Princeton University Press, 2016. xv + 200 pages. In the nineteenth century, most classical liberals believed that the state had to provide protective services. Gustave de Molinari disagreed; in The Production of Security (1849), he argued that private companies could provide these services. But few
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 4 (Winter 2016) Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016 Cohen and DeLong are well-known economists, but they indict their fellow economists for an overemphasis on theory. Away with models that have little relation to reality, our authors say. Instead,
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 91st birthday. It’s impossible to convey fully what he was like to those who did not know him; but here are a couple of stories about my unforgettable mentor and friend. In the fall of 1979, Murray gave a talk on the origins of World War II. He was not a specialist in European diplomatic history, but in his
If asked to name the foremost critic of Marxism, most economists sympathetic to the free market would name Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who in his treatise Capital and Interest and his separate brochure Karl Marx and the Close of His System demolished the labor theory of value, the linchpin of Marxist economics. But the labor theory is but one part of
I am sorry to have to report that Ralph Raico has passed away. His intellectual brilliance was evident from an early age, and while still in high school, he attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at New York University. There he met Murray Rothbard, who became his lifelong friend. Ralph was one of the most brilliant members of Rothbard’s Circle
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.