Every once in a while, I see a car bearing bumper sticker, “Buy American.” From what I gather, it is a popular sticker in Michigan, especially in cities like Detroit and Pontiac. “Americans have to pull together,” we are told. “They ought to help each other. If they don’t stop buying those foreign imports, they’re going to kill the U.S. economy.”
Prime Minister May says that she has reached an agreement with the European Union. The agreement is 585 pages long. Every time politicians vote to implement a 600-page document that was written by high-level bureaucrats, the liberties of the citizens of that nation decline. The devil is in the details, and there are a lot of details for the devil
[ Reprinted from Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader , compiled by Bettina G. Greaves .] The division of labor is a subject which has fascinated social scientists for millennia. Before the advent of modem times, philosophers and theologians concerned themselves with the implications of the idea. Plato saw as the ultimate form of society a
Mises never tired of telling his students and readers that trends can change. What makes them change are the choices we make, the values we hold, the ideas we advance, the institutions we support...Unlike Mises, we do not face obstacles that appear hopelessly high. We owe it to his memory to throw ourselves completely into the intellectual
One of the foundational principles of free market economics is the principle of personal responsibility. Individuals are responsible for their own actions. This is true not simply in the realm of the free market itself. It also applies to the realm of nonprofits, including churches, foundations, and charitable institutions of all kinds. While
I have spent my whole adult life in the shadow of one man, Karl Marx. By the age of 14, I recognized how important Marx was in history. I began to study some of his writings when I was a senior in high school. I continued to study him seriously in graduate school, and in 1968 my book on Marx was published. Karl Marx changed the world. Yet he did
History is an easy subject to teach if you are intellectually lazy. It is the most challenging subject to teach if you have a great memory, read a lot, and care about understanding causes and effects. You keep having to rewrite your narrative to fill the same number of lessons every year. Time marches on. If you pad your lectures, no big problem.
This is a simple video, cheap to produce, and free to post. It is about the fact of its own existence. The talking head is the remarkable investigator James Corbett. We are witnessing an incomparable transformation of world civilization, and we barely recognize it. We are too busy to recognize it. We are hard-pressed to think through the
“It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle-down,’” he [David Stockman] explained, “so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle-down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.” [William Greider, “What David Stockman Said,” Washington Post ( Nov. 22, 1981 ) During the Eisenhower administration, critics of the
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.