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[This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Reno Mises Circle in Reno, Nevada. on May 20, 2023.] It is not an exaggeration to say that property rights are a prerequisite for civilization. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth : Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the

In his must-read new book,  The Real Anthony Fauci , Robert F. Kennedy Jr. describes how journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Fauci’s “secretive experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities in New York and six other states between 1988 and 2002” (p.

When people hear the word “fascism” they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s as “corporatism,” that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as

Like virtually all of the work of Ludwig von Mises, these two essays, his 1958 Liberty and Property  and his 1950 Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism  are timeless. They are as important now as they have ever been and will increase in relevance as the growth of government continues almost unabated. The growth of government constitutes an

First pollution would cause a new ice age unless we destroyed capitalism and replaced it with socialism and central planning. That didn’t work out, so then we were told that capitalism was causing global warming and therefore must be destroyed and replaced with socialism and central planning. That didn’t work out either, so then we were told that

Investor and author Doug Casey recently wrote that most economists “are political apologists masquerading as economists.” He says they are like witch doctors pretending to be neurosurgeons. They “prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more

After the War to Prevent Southern Independence and the assassination of Lincoln the federal government was said to possess a “treasury of virtue.” The Republican Party, which was the federal government, with a decades-long monopoly of power rivaled only by the Bolsheviks in Russia, made sure that the government-run schools would preach this

When Charles Adams published his book  For Good and Evil , a world history of taxation, the most controversial chapter by far was the one on whether or not tariffs caused the American War between the States. That chapter generated so much discussion and debate that Adams’s publisher urged him to turn it into an entire book, which he did, in the

In a 1922 essay about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in his book  Prejudices: Third Series  H.L. Mencken asked, “Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg Address”? One example of the nonsense of Lincoln’s rhetoric as explained by Mencken is as follows: “Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words

This month, we will host the Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC), one of our most important programs. We’ll have thirty-one students attending, and nineteen students will deliver papers of their own. How encouraging! Dr. Joseph Salerno, our Academic Vice President, says: “The students who present papers at AERC are of the highest