Students of free enterprise usually trace the origins of pro-market thinking to Scottish professor Adam Smith (1723–90). This tendency to see Smith as the fountainhead of economics is reinforced among Americans because his famed book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nation was published the year of American independence
Ludwig von Mises was the greatest economist and defender of liberty in the twentieth century. In scholarship and in passion for freedom, his rightful heir is Murray N. Rothbard. Rothbard was born in New York City in 1926. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and studied for more than 10 years under Mises at New York University. However,
The Mises Institute is in high gear. Publications, students, scholars, conferences, seminars, media exposure, professorships: all are soaring to new heights. Despite some dire trends in the world, there’s great cause for optimism about the future of liberty. It is our 35th year; how privileged we’ve been to work for the ideas of liberty, for
The Free Market 25, no. 7 (July/August 2007) The world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States
The Free Market 26, no. 3 (March 2008) We all want to live well and no one wants their living standard to decline. No one likes recession. It’s just the way we are made. This is one reason that the official environmentalist movement has an uphill battle. The poverty that comes with living without industrial civilization lacks public support—once
The Free Market 27, no. 2 (February 2009) We are fortunate to be living in these times, for we are seeing the unfolding of events long explained and predicted by the Austrian tradition. Maybe that sounds implausible. What is fortunate about our times? The economy is tanking, stocks have been pummeled, unemployment is rising, and Washington is
The Free Market 28, no. 10 (July 2010) USA Today offered a roundup of how the great recession has affected American life. The trends are gleaned from US Census data, which provide a look at how economic downturns can devastate a society, and offer a glimpse into a theme that the Austrian tradition has long emphasized. Economics isn’t just about
The Free Market 29, no. 7 (Fall 2011) Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society. This describes
“On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.” Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty.
Every four years, as the November presidential election draws near, I have the same daydream: that I don’t know or care who the president of the United States is. More importantly, I don’t need to know or care. I don’t have to vote or even pay attention to debates. I can ignore all campaign commercials. There are no high stakes for my family or my
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.
