I’d like to consider some criticisms of anarcho-capitalist theories of property acquisition raised by Jesse Spafford in his article “Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property,” included in The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought , edited by Gary Chartier and Chad Van Schoelandt (Routledge, 2021). Spafford, a research
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was a bestseller when it was published in 1944, and it has remained ever since one of the classic works in the literature of liberty. Many people, though, find it hard to understand. After Glenn Beck featured the book on his television show in 2010, resulting in a surge in demand for it, one noted speaker at
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden University of Chicago Press, 2020 xvii + 227 pages McCloskey and Carden endeavor to explain one of the most striking facts of world history. Since about 1800, there has been an enormous increase in the average standard of
Professor Toshio Murata of the Yokohama College of Commerce died on March 12, 2021, at the venerable age of ninety-seven. During World War II, he was a staff officer responsible for economic planning in Shanghai, under the Japanese occupation. He soon found out that central planning in a city of that size did not work, and, when his opinions
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad. Regnery, 2020 xvi + 240 pages Gad Saad, a psychologist who specializes in applying evolutionary biology to the study of consumer behavior, has written a book of great value, and moreover, it is a book that
Jonathan Culbreath, posting on the American Conservative web page (March 24, 2021), urges his fellow conservatives to adopt a fashionable leftist bromide, modern monetary theory (MMT). Mr. Culbreath relies for his account of MMT on the popular book by Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth , which I reviewed here . According to MMT, a government that
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Many people think that a universal basic income (UBI) would be a good substitute for the welfare state. Under this proposal, each person resident in a country would receive a guaranteed income, sufficient to live at a modest level. People would get the money unconditionally. Unlike
A recent post by Francis P. Sempa on the University Bookman site offers valuable information on the genesis of James Burnham’s Cold War global crusading. Burnham, who worked after World War II as a CIA agent, was the dominant intellectual influence behind William Buckley’s efforts at National Review to purge Old Right advocates of a
Many readers will be familiar with Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism , a brilliant criticism of the state’s authority that arrives at conclusions similar to those of Lysander Spooner. Wolff is probably best known for his work on Kant, but he has published penetrating accounts of Marx and Rawls as well. He thinks that Marx offers an
I ended my article last week with a rash assertion. Marx says that capitalists exploit workers, and I countered that this claim depends on the false labor theory of value. It is vital to bear in mind that when Marx talks about exploitation, he has a technical sense of the concept in mind, rather than the popular sense, in which “exploitation”
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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.