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As a culture, we like our reality on television, but seem to oppose it in economics. For more than two years now, and even longer depending on your dating scheme, the federal government has waged war on the reality of the incredible Fed-fueled bubble that developed in housing, with spillover effects on the rest of economic life. That bubble had to

It’s another revolutionary season in American politics, with voters preparing to do everything they can within the structure of the law to throw out the bad guys and the bad system they represent. The focus is on this amorphous thing called the Tea Party, which embodies a huge range of political impulses from libertarian to authoritarian, united

USA Today loves to run lifestyle features that purport to show how we are living, what we are doing, what we like and what we don’t like — premised on a collectivist assumption that all our preferences can be tracked and characterized with these aggregate claims. Most of the time, these features are silly. It’s not really true that we are all

Listen to  the  Audio Mises Wire  version  of this article. For seventy-plus years, the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has vexed people of a libertarian bent. His policies, extending war socialism based on Mussolini’s economic structure, expanded the American state to an unthinkable extent and prolonged the Great Depression through the horrific

John Maynard Keynes thought he had pretty well killed gold as a monetary standard back in the 1930s. Governments of the world did their best to help him. It took longer than they thought. Gold in the money survived all the way to Nixon, and it was he who finally drove the stake in once and for all. That was supposed to be the end of it, and the

Murray Rothbard, in his life, was known as Mr. Libertarian. We can make a solid case that the title now belongs to Walter Block, a student of Rothbard’s whose own vita is as thick as a phone book, as diverse as Wikipedia. Whether he is writing on economic theory, ethics, political secession, drugs, roads, education, monetary policy, social theory,

The terrible job market has vexed an entire generation. It shows no hope of improving anytime soon. Young people are shut out. College students are taking refuge in matriculation without end. Thirty-somethings are zoning out in their parents’ basements and attics. Despair for the future has become a theme of American public life. The question we

With each published interview, Ron Paul only seems to become more articulate, more persuasive and compelling, more to the pedagogical point in explaining the meaning and priority of liberty as the central political principle. Those of us who understand can only cheer. Those who hold contradictory opinions — favoring liberty in some areas and

[This article originally appeared in The American Conservative (2011).]   Eisenhower’s farewell speech was a long and nearly hysterical argument for the Cold War. He presented it as more than a military policy against Russia, but rather as a grand metaphysical struggle that should take over our minds and souls, as bizarre as that must sound to the

[This talk was delivered at the Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on January 22, 2011. The audio of this speech is available here .] John Maynard Keynes was born in 1883 and died in 1946. Henry Hazlitt was born in 1894, eleven years after Keynes, and lived much longer, until 1993. Their lives and loyalties are a study in contrast, and mostly of