Listen to the MP3 audio version of this commentary . Yes, I know this is all “inside baseball,” but I can’t help adding my two cents. By now several well-known libertarians and economists have offered rebuttals to Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains . Our own David Gordon’s review gives a good sense of MacLean’s shoddy work, her deep
[ The Daily Caller , June 23, 2017 ] A new Rasmussen poll reports that a majority of voters think so, and it certainly feels that way. Since Donald Trump’s election in November, the pace and intensity of deeply divisive rhetoric has accelerated. Antifa and the Alt-Right are literally fighting in the streets. Combative talking heads on cable
Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. — Ludwig von Mises Peace is popular. That was Ron Paul’s message to our audience in Texas earlier this spring, and it has been his consistent message since first running for
Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not suffer fools gladly. Author of several books including The Black Swan and Antifragile , Taleb is known for his incendiary personality almost as much as his brilliant work in probability theory. Readers of his very active Medium page will experience a formidable mind with no patience for trendy groupthink, a mind that
The late economist Friedrich Hayek, celebrated earlier this week on the anniversary of his birthday, left an enduring body of work and a place in history as the reluctant winner of a Nobel Prize he thought suited only to the physical sciences. But exactly how enduring his work and his legacy will remain is an important question, and not just for
Today is Tax Day in America. When April 15th happens to fall on a weekend, the IRS generously permits us to extend the filing ritual until the following Monday. But since Monday was a holiday in the District of Columbia known (without irony) as Emancipation Day, we all enjoyed an extra bonus day to comply. And for the most part, comply we do: the
Paul-Martin Foss at the Carl Menger Center for the Study of Money and Banking has penned a nice retort to Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, who recently criticized Rand Paul’s introduction of an “Audit the Fed” bill in the US Senate. “Mr. Fisher apparently has forgotten that that same untrustworthy Congress created the Federal Reserve
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard details the increasing level of Greek defiance to its ECB overlords in the wake of a left-wing, populist uprising in recent Greek elections. It has become blatantly obvious that the political, legal, fiscal, regulatory, and monetary centralization project known as the EU has increased rather than decreased nationalist
It is vitally important that those of us who criticize central banking and endorse the private provision of commodity money understand how the Fed operates. To that end, this out of print (1991) publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago provides an excellent summary of Fed money mechanics. A few notes of interest: First, some of the
Swiss National Bank governors sound a lot like Fed and ECB central bankers when it comes to the upcoming Swiss referendum on gold. It might deprive them of needed “flexibility.” And you might be surprised by how much the SNB has increased the country’s money supply since 2008, despite our image of the Swiss franc as a more stable (or less
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.
