Not for the first time in world history, US voters on November 2 faced a choice between two varieties of statism, two forms of central planning, two types of duplicity, two approaches to rule by government. One won, one lost, and liberty awaits another day for victory. In this, our times are not unlike the 1930s, when during a crisis just about
What we had not imagined – though we should have – is that a threat to liberty would emerge that is just as great if not greater than the socialist left, namely the nationalist, warmongering, chauvinist right, that works in cooperation with deluded evangelicals and imperialistic Wilsonians of the neoconservative school. What makes this enemy
You heard the warnings that terrorists could attack specific sites in Washington, Manhattan, and Newark. We are talking the stock exchange, Citigroup, the World Bank, and the IMF. Had it never occurred to anyone that these might be targets? No, we had to find that out by discovering secret memos. Thank goodness for our intelligence services! What
What’s really at issue is a matter of history, causality, and faith. Do we owe our high standard of living to the market or the state? That is the question. The interventionists and statists credit the state because they get their causal connections mixed up (and this is because they have not studied economics) and they take a leap of faith to
What do you do with a state – a highly centralized and militarized state – that has unconstrained hegemonic ambitions and is a proven threat to its citizens and other nations around the world? This is a question that has vexed liberally minded thinkers for centuries. In particular, much to the sadness of any real American, it is a question that
We wake to the cultural equivalent of Mao’s China or Lenin’s Russia, in which the people are supposedly mourning the loss of the Great Leader. [ Full article ]
Let me propose a solution to a puzzle that has vexed all of us for nearly three years – since 9-11, actually. The puzzle concerns the sheer ubiquity of dissembling in the Age of Bush. [ Full Article ] Also, my essay “ War, the God that Failed “ in Spanish ( Atlas.org
The privatization plot was hatched decades ago as a scheme to get around the need for truth and radical reform. It has amounted to nothing. Such is the price of compromise and “political realism.” The lesson is that there is no substitute for truth – even in politics. [ Full Article on LRC
Why the state goes to war is not a mystery – at least the general reasons are not mysterious. War is an excuse for spending money on its friends. It can punish enemies that are not going with the program. It intimidates other states tempted to go their own way. It can pave the way for commercial interests linked to the state. The regime that makes
What is the relationship between the rise of big government and the rise of American prosperity? It seems that people on the right and left are quick to confuse correlation with causation. They believe that the US is wealthy because the government is big and expansive. This error is probably the most common of all errors in political economy. It
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.
