The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America Noah Feldman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 368 pp. Noah Feldman, who teaches at Harvard Law School, has in this excellent though flawed book given us an account of Abraham Lincoln which lends support to the critical portrayal of him presented by Murray Rothbard and Thomas
Why Does Inequality Matter? by T.M. Scanlon Oxford University Press, 2018, 170 pp. T.M. Scanlon, who taught philosophy for many years at Princeton and Harvard, is one of the leading moral and political philosophers of the past fifty years or so. Though far from a libertarian, he takes libertarian views with great seriousness and has endeavored to
You will not be surprised to learn that my answer is no, but what I’d like to discuss in this week’s column is an argument by an eminent philosopher that we should. Robert Hanna is an authority on Kant (Objectivist readers will already see trouble ahead), and in an article published online this month, “ Gun Crazy: A Moral Argument for Gun
Murray Rothbard was at one time good friends with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of the public choice analysis of government, and he also corresponded on friendly terms with James Buchanan, another of the founders. Both Rothbard and the public choice movement look with suspicion on claims by agents of the government to be acting for the
Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020 By Thomas Piketty Yale University Press, 2021 352 pages Thomas Piketty has written a useful book. Readers need no longer plough their way through his vast Capital in the Twenty-First Century , not to mention his even vaster Capital and Ideology, to understand his message. This fairly
Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom by Rob Larson Zero Books, 2018, 233 pp. Rob Larson, who is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington, does not agree with Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and Friedman that the free market promotes freedom and prosperity and that socialism is the “road to serfdom.” That is an
Pathways to Policy Failure by Gary Galles American Institute for Economic Research, 2020, 490 pp. Gary Galles, an economics professor at Pepperdine University, has in this outstanding book shown how to apply basic economic principles to evaluate concrete policy proposals. In doing so, he offers a comprehensive defense of the free market and
Critics of egalitarianism, meaning by that equality, or close to it, of income and wealth among the members of a society, often claim that it rests on envy. In response, defenders say that there are respectable reasons to favor equality. (I’m assuming that envy doesn’t count as a respectable reason.) For instance, it can be argued that inequality
Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849 by Patrick Newman Mises Institute, 2021, 362 pp. Patrick Newman dedicates Cronyism to Murray Rothbard, and it is a fitting choice, as this outstanding book continues and extends Rothbard’s brilliant interpretation of American history. Newman is eminently qualified to do so, having edited
Murray Rothbard views the eighteenth-century French economist and administrator Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot as a great and admirable figure, but David Graeber and David Wengrow do not agree. In their recently published The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), they present Turgot as a force for evil. His ideas provided a
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.