Mises Search

[This article is excerpted from A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Matthew Mezinskis, is available for download .]   As an outpost of Great Britain, colonial America of course used British pounds, pence, and shillings as its money. Great Britain was officially on a silver

[Excerpted from Rothbard’s 1978 preface to Ludwig von Mises’s The Clash of Group Interests and Other Essays ] In the 20th century, the advocates of free-market economics almost invariably pin the blame for government intervention solely on erroneous ideas — that is, on incorrect ideas about which policies will advance the public weal. To most of

[This article is excerpted from A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Matthew Mezinskis, is available for download .]   Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial

[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .]   The Enlightenment was a general movement in European thought in the 18th century that stressed the power of human reason to

[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .]   David Hume (1711–1776) David Hume (1711–1776), the famous Scottish philosopher, was a close friend of Adam Smith’s who was named

[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .]   Adam Smith’s lectures converted the merchants of Glasgow to a free-trade position, but most of his influence was spread through the

The Austrian theory of money virtually begins and ends with Ludwig von Mises’s monumental Theory of Money and Credit , published in 1912. Mises’s fundamental accomplishment was to take the theory of marginal utility, built up by Austrian economists and other marginalists as the explanation for consumer demand and market price, and apply it to the

The stimulating methodological controversy between Professors Machlup and Hutchison proves that there are sometimes more than two sides to every question. In many ways, the two are debating at cross-purposes: Professor Hutchison is primarily tilting against the methodological (and political) views of Professor Ludwig von Mises; his most serious

[Excerpted from For a New Liberty (1973)] Compulsory labor permeates our legal and judicial structure. Thus, much-venerated judicial procedure rests upon coerced testimony . Since it is axiomatic to libertarianism that all coercion — in this case, all coerced labor — against everyone except convicted criminals be eliminated, this means that

The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr. , for failing to use its “strategic intelligence” in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors” (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring