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[This talk was given at the 2009 Jeremy Davis Mises Circle in Houston. An MP3 audio file of this talk is available for download .]   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

President Obama is under the impression that history owes him $1 trillion right now to spend on whatever he wants. His language is strident and full of irritation that anyone would question his right to live out his personal dream of being Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush’s Hoover. This, he says, is what the election was all about. The arrogance

The theme of my book, The Left, the Right, and the State , is that both sides of the political aisle represent a grave threat to liberty — though each of a different sort. It is like two people tugging at a turkey’s wishbone: the turkey is liberty, and you are the bone. We’ve lived through eight years of the threat from the Right. It was all about

The great failing of the Obama administration is that it is packed with people who show no apparent knowledge of the essential truths of liberal theory. That theory — which is the core of the American political contribution to, and the driving force of, modernity itself — is that freedom is the foundation of and the reason for social and economic

It’s raining, pouring, economic fallacies by the hour, followed by a flood of horrible policy that is driving us ever further into economic depression. The regime in charge has really gone nuts, revealing itself as both deeply ignorant and horribly evil. We find ourselves facing the horror of what has always been the Achilles heel of the left

It is a magnificent thing that Murray Rothbard’s most overlooked masterpiece, his Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , has now been made available free online in two volumes, with complete navigation tools: Economic Thought Before Adam Smith and Classical Economics . It is the culmination of a process that began in the 1980s

Burt Blumert, 1929–2009 In every age, the idea of liberty needs benefactors, far-seeing people willing to make personal sacrifices so that each new generation is taught not to take freedom for granted, but rather to fight for it in every field of life. That is necessary because the idea of liberty isn’t really a product that can be provided either

Are you all for Obama’s economic plans? Do you think that bailing out failing companies and throwing trillions into the national money pit is just the ticket for stimulating the economy back to recovery? Then you might get the chance to put your money where your ideological convictions are. The Obama administration is cajoling investment companies

A standard test of a country’s well-being is whether people want in or out. Whether you have an immigration issue or an emigration issue is telling. For example, people wanted out of East Germany and wanted into West Germany. People wanted out of Russia and into Estonia. People once wanted out of China, whereas now they want in. These demographic

The glorious Barack Obama, broad-minded humanitarian universalist that he is, promised to reverse the wickedness of the Bush administration, which ran a prison camp in Guantánamo Bay and kept pictures of ruthless abuse from public view to save the face of Bush Bush the despot! Obama the savior! And sure enough, after taking office, Obama did