Mises Search

Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the reemergence-with a bang-in the last five years of a third and much neglected aspect of the real world, the “nation.” When the “nation” has been thought of at all, it usually

Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early

When a country goes off the gold standard and onto the fiat standard, it adds to the number of “moneys” in existence. In addition to the commodity moneys, gold and silver, there now flourish independent moneys directed by each government imposing its fiat rule. And just as gold and silver will have an exchange rate on the free market, so the

[This article first ran in the June 1992 issue of Chronicle s (pp. 49–52)] In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being

The Murray Rothbard wall poster depicts a graying professor pecking at a typewriter. His words rise magically from the machine and blend into a black flag of anarchy rippling above his head. Beneath the drawing is the caption: “Murray N. Rothbard—the greatest living enemy of the state.” The poster, like almost everything else relating to politics,

Ours is truly an Age of Statistics. In a country and an era that worships statistical data as super “scientific,” as offering us the keys to all knowledge, a vast supply of data of all shapes and sizes pours forth upon us. Mostly, it pours forth from government. While private agencies and trade associations do gather and issue some statistics,

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,

There is the ancient bugbear of “hoarding.” The image is conjured up of the selfish old miser who, perhaps irrationally, perhaps from evil motives, hoards up gold unused in his cellar or treasure trove—thereby stopping the flow of circulation and trade, causing depressions and other problems. Is hoarding really a menace? In the first place, what

Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that  all  pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital. The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the

Perhaps the leading argument for democracy is that it substitutes “ballots for bullets”: that it replaces the inconvenient and disruptive processes of violent change by peaceful changes expressing the majority will. Some democrats have defined democracy as majority rule, while others have placed on this rule the limitation that minorities must