Originally published September 1977 in Libertarian Review . In any debate between a socialist and a free-market capitalist, all too often the socialist quickly puts the free-market advocate on the defensive, and the entire time is consumed by the free-market person fending off attacks on the ability of the market to prevent inequality, or business
One prominent person rarely associated by scholars with the Bastiat-Ferrara laissez-faire school was the eminent sociologist and economic theorist, Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (1848-1923). Pareto was born in Paris into a noble Genoan family. His father, the Marchese Raffaelle Pareto, a hydraulic engineer, had fled Italy as a republican and
[A selection from Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought , Spring-Autumn 1967.] The chronic Middle East crisis goes back – as do many crises – to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same
Editors Note: Much of Murray Rothbard’s historical work was grounded upon power elite analysis. Justin Raimondo noted the value of this work, “Theoreticians of the Left and Right are constantly referring to abstract “forces” when they examine and attempt to explain historical patterns. Applying the principle of methodological individualism — which
To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of runaway inflation , we the people must take the money-supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy,
Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the “free-market economy”; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts,
We have already described one part of the contemporary flight from sound, free market money to statized and inflated money: the abolition of the gold standard by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and the substitution of fiat paper tickets by the Federal Reserve as our “monetary standard.” Another crucial part of this process was the federal
One of the reasons that most economists of the 1920s did not recognize the existence of an inflationary problem was the widespread adoption of a stable price level as the goal and criterion for monetary policy. The extent to which the Federal Reserve authorities were guided by a desire to keep the price level stable has been a matter of
[This article is excerpted from Economic Controversies , chapter 21, “The Fallacy of the ‘Public Sector’” (2011). It originally appeared in the New Individualist Review (Summer, 1961): 3–7.] We have heard a great deal in recent years of the “public sector,” and solemn discussions abound through the land on whether or not the public sector should
During the 1930s, the Rockefellers pushed hard for war against Japan, which they saw as competing with them vigorously for oil and rubber resources in Southeast Asia and as endangering the Rockefellers’ cherished dreams of a mass “China market” for petroleum products. On the other hand, the Rockefellers took a noninterventionist position in
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.