Our times are much like the 1930s, when it was widely assumed that there are only two viable ideological positions: communism or fascism. Liberalism of the old school was considered to be a failure, and not even worth considering. Why does libertarianism never entirely disappear, despite every attempt to kill it? In part, because a strain of
As opponent of all forms of censorship, I still do not believe that there is good reason to join the hate campaign against Google for complying with the Chinese government’s restrictions on what Google’s search engines can call up. Yes, all information should be available to all people. But given the choice, it is better to have tons of
Tim Harford offers an interesting analysis of the great XBox shortage of 2005. They are selling for $300, except that they are not selling because there is a massive shortage. He asks the question: why doesn’t Microsoft raise the price to $700 or more in order to clear the market, since that’s the price they are selling for on Ebay? This is an
I have a column on the controversy over libertarians being paid to write columns that back special interests. It ends with a long discussion by Mises on the difference between genuine liberalism and special-interest
The Washington Post is astonished (and outraged) to encounter a libertarian. Writes Libby Copeland: “Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like Social Security and Medicaid existed, before the federal government outlawed drugs like heroin.” Those are
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) Watching Joel Klein of the Antitrust Division on television, speaking about the dangers that Microsoft poses to the public, calls to mind a passage from Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State: “Born in sin, the bastard offspring of declining autocracy and bureaucracy run amok, the state is a
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) Francis Fukuyama, the famed author of The End of History , has tried his hand at political prognostication on the question of socialism. Writing in Time Magazine, he argues that full-blown socialism is dead for the foreseeable future. There will be no more attempts to fully collectivize the means of
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors’ supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on
The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000) Both Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were called upon during wartime to weigh in on the question: what is the best economic policy in the conduct of war? Both were opposed to using war as a device for socializing the economy. If a war must be waged, they argued in their roles as value-free economists,
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.
