It’s also worth pointing out that Mises and Hayek explained the great Depression before it occurred. Part of the reason for Austrian Business Cycle Theory’s brief popularity during the 1930s was that they were recognised as having predicted what would happen. And of course Mises wrote his “Causes of the Economic Crisis” in 1931. This, by the
A student recently asked me what was known of “Rothbard’s opinion on the events of early May, 1968 in France.” I turned to Joe Stromberg, Jedi Master of the Rothbard Archives, who kindly dug out for me two columns Rothbard wrote for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph in 1968: “The Student Revolution” and “French Revolution – 1968.” For anyone
In this article by Rothbard, we find the following: “while liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar
Volume 6, No. 1 (Spring 2003) Ethics and economics need to learn from one another. But what is it, precisely, that needs to be learned? Here Yeager’s answer is more controversial; he defends what might be called Austro-utilitarianism (the term is mine, not his), i.e., a version of utilitarianism informed by the concerns of the Austrian
Volume 9, No. 3 (Fall 2006) Austrians have frequently criticized neoclassical economics for the unrealistic character of its assumptions. Neoclassical models are typically “idealized”; that is, they leave out such features of the real-world economy as rivalry, imperfect information, nonmonetary incentives, and the passage of time. In his
Did anyone catch President Bush’s endorsement of anarchism today? At least I reckon that’s what he must have meant when he said “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.” As one of the unwilling, I was very happy to hear
Herbert Spencer was one of the 19th century’s greatest defenders of peace and freedom. I’ve recently posted some chapters from his book Facts and Comments , published in the penultimate year of his life, on the evils of militarism and the reciprocal relation between imperialism, statism, and the brutalisation of popular culture. This is the first
As many of our readers will know, anarchism comes in both free-market and socialist varieties. Free-market anarchists (or “anarcho-capitalists”) like Gustave de Molinari and Murray Rothbard favour replacing the monopolistic state with competing private services in a fully capitalistic social order based on private property and free exchange. By
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.