Mises Search

Once in a blue moon, the Austrian school attracts the attention of serious scholars outside of its tradition. In the months after Janek Wasserman at University of Alabama published The Marginal Revolutionaries in 2019, lots of Austrians revisited the old masters and the fin-de-siécle Vienna from which they stemmed: they found lots to like and even

The temptation and crucial flaw of a totalitarian mind are that everyone must play a part in a superstructural battle between good and evil. Standing on the sidelines or taking a neutral position on present topics is not allowed; one may not merely observe or ignore the madness played out among the power hungry. As a not-so-proud carrier of a

Legislators have a strange relationship with magic. To achieve that which physically cannot be done, they like to wave magic wands and pretend that it can. Reality puts a limit on political power, a realization that always sits poorly with those in charge of our trillion-dollar bureaucratic machinery. Senator Elizabeth Warren is a stunning case in

Life on Earth is gradually getting better in every way, shape, and form. Dark times—like the present—are the major reason why that’s a hard sell for most people; energy crises, inflation, wars, deficits, and pandemics seem to suggest that things are bad. When people (like yours truly) repeat the established observation that human life is gradually

The world we come from had lots of death. Every society we know of before the mid-1800s or so saw more than one in four children die during their first year of life. Of those who made it through this first difficult year—through disease, malnutrition, famines, or natural disasters—another quarter or so died before they reached fifteen. Into the

Open a popular magazine of your choice, or even the newspaper of record, and you’ll find a lot of fascinating claims seemingly backed by scientific aura. Eat this superfood and you’ll be healthy; do this minor thing every day and you’ll be successful; have governments just slightly change some condition that faces us hapless humans and we’ll

“Happy families are all alike,” goes the Leo Tolstoy quote from the Russian classic Anna Karenina , “but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same can be said about government-focused technocrats and their central planning tendencies : all happy technocrats are alike, but every unhappy citizen-subject living under their rule is

On we go, further and further into the era of post-journalism, where outlets survive not on the accuracy and honesty of their reporting but on the appeal of their narrative. —Fred Skulthorp, The Critic Nobody has missed that the West suffers from a credibility problem. Its institutions—by which we mean the media, government officials, academia,

When I was at the university, I once objected to a classmate’s lazy use of “public goods.” He had used it to favor his policy position, as a shorthand synonym of what’s good for society—only a thinly veiled euphemism for what I want to happen . “Public goods are things that are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable,” I said, almost sputtering off a

The ironic thing about Michael Malice’s book The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics is that it mostly deals with the Left. What unites the Right, argues Malice, is that they all hate the Left. His definition of the New Right reads: a loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they