Mises Search

[This article is excerpted from One Is a Crowd . Robert LeFevre also gave a lecture on the biblical Joseph: “First Secretary of Agriculture” ( available in MP3 in Mises Media ).]   Long, long before Freud, a fellow named Joseph got himself a reputation as an interpreter of dreams. So, when all the PhD’s of Egypt failed him, Pharaoh sent for this

[This article is excerpted from chapter one of The Rise and Fall of Society .] It may be that wary beasts of the forest come around to accepting the hunter’s trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food. At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a

[Chapter XVIII, Out of Step ] The dogma that the State or the Government is the embodiment of all that is good and beneficial and that the individuals are wretched underlings, exclusively intent upon inflicting harm upon one another and badly in need of a guardian, is almost unchallenged. It is taboo to question it in the slightest way. He who

[This article is excerpted from chapter two of The Rise and Fall of Society .] Is the State ordered in the nature of things? The classical theorists in political science were so persuaded. Observing that every agglomeration of humans known to history was attended with a political institution of some kind, and convinced that in all human affairs

[This article is excerpted from chapter 9 of The Rise and Fall of Society .]   Dionysius, the storied tyrant of Syracuse, was a consummate financier. His gift stood him in good stead on the day he found himself in bankrupt condition, having borrowed from the citizenry more than he could repay. He might have increased taxes and satisfied his

[This article is excerpted from chapter 13 of The Rise and Fall of Society . An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available for download .] Foremost among the services which the State claims to render Society is its protection from other predatory States. This is a considerable service, to be sure. In former times, when

[From chapter 14 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov .] The small State can do to Society everything the large State can do, but not so much of it. The tyranny and terrorism of modern communistic overlords is of a kind with the practices of ancient Sparta, and twenty-five centuries before Mr. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, Pericles

[From The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov .]   There is this to be said in behalf of avowed and doctrinaire socialists, that their faith in the State is sublime. To them, the institution of political power is the unerring shepherd of the flock, the guide to the Good Society; it is also the antidote for all evil, the maker of abundance,

[From The Rise and Fall of Society ] It is not incumbent on a diagnostician to prescribe a remedy, and it would be quackery for him to do so when he has misgivings as to its curative value. It may be that the struggle between Society and the State is inevitable; it may be in the nature of things for the struggle to continue until mutual

The search for a formula for the “good society” has never been abandoned, hope being what it is, and out of the laboratory of the human mind has come a congeries of utopias. The connotation of unreality that the word has acquired follows from the fact that every utopia ignores the central operating lever of man: he seeks to satisfy his desires