Rights and Income Security

James Rice (McMaster Univeristy) and Walter Block (Fraser Institute) discuss Rights and Income Security. Recorded at the University of Victoria Public Forum; October 1988 [1:58:10]

How Empires Bamboozle the Bourgeoisie

An Anarchist Legal Order (video)

Culture and Liberty (video)

An Anarchist Legal Order

Property, Land, Contract (video)

Nozick's Argument for the Minimal State (video)

Punishment and War (video)

Justice, Rights, and Consequences (video)

Narveson's Theory of Ethics (video)

An Aristotelian Ethics of Virtue (video)

The Moral Standpoint (video)

Free Will: Two Paradoxes of Choice (video)

The Praxeological Case for an Ultimate End (video)

Objective and Subjective Value (video)

How States Fall and Liberty Triumphs

14. War and Foreign Policy

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:34:45]

12. The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:20:34]

11. The Public Sector, II: Streets and Roads

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [37:11]

10. The Public Sector, I: Government in Business

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [18:45]

8. Welfare and the Welfare State

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:24:23]

7. Education

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:06:58]

6. Personal Liberty

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:13:02]

4. Libertarian Applications to Current Problems: The Problems

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [17:02]

3. The State

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:14:53]

2. The Libertarian Creed: Property and Exchange

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach [1:10:29]

Ludwig von Mises as a Laissez-faire Radical: The Quest for the Historical Mises

From the Libertarian Heritage Series, sponsored by the Center for Libertarian Studies; October 16, 1981. [32:59]

Five Best Books on the Current Crisis

Five Best Books on the Current Crisis Various Artists Economic Downturn: Cause and Cure

Five Best Books on the Current Crisis

Five Best Books on the Current Crisis Various Artists Economic Downturn: Cause and Cure

The First World War

Lecture 9 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

Classical Liberalism and the Welfare-Warfare State

Lecture 10 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

The Anti-Capitalists

Lecture 7 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

The Planned Society

Lecture 8 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

The New World of Capitalism

Lecture 6 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

War, Peace, and the Industrial Revolution

Lecture 5 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

Class and Conflict

Lecture 4 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

John Stuart Mill

Lecture 3 in Ralph Raico's seminar, "History: The Struggle For Liberty".

The European Miracle

Lecture 1 in Ralph Raico's seminar. "History: The Struggle for Liberty".

The Political Economy of the Chicago School: Libertarian or Jacobin?

Joseph Salerno talks about The Political Economy of the Chicago School: Libertarian of Jacobin? at the Austrian School of Economics: Revisionist History and Contemporary Theory seminar on June 9th, 2005.

The Wealth of Nations: Ideology, Religion, Biology, and Environment

Hans-Hermann Hoppe presents lecture five in his Economy, Society & History series; "The Wealth of Nations: Ideology, Religion, Biology, and Environment" in 2004.

The Law

How is it that the law enforcer itself does not have to keep the law? How is it that the law permits the state to lawfully engage in actions which, if undertaken by individuals, would land them in jail?

These are among the most intriguing issues in political and economic philosophy. More specifically, the problem of law that itself violates law is an insurmountable conundrum of all statist philosophies.

The problem has never been discussed so profoundly and passionately as in this essay by Frederic Bastiat from 1850. The essay might have been written today. It applies in ever way to our own time, which is precisely why so many people credit this one essay for showing them the light of liberty.

Bastiat's essay here is timeless because applies whenever and wherever the state assumes unto itself different rules and different laws from that by which it expects other people to live.

And so we have this legendary essay, written in a white heat against the leaders of 19th century France, the reading of which has shocked millions out of their toleration of despotism. This new edition from the Mises Institute revives a glorious translation that has been out of print for a hundred years, one that circulated in Britain in the generation that followed Bastiat’s death.

This newly available translation provides new insight into Bastiat’s argument. It is a more sophisticated, more subsantial, and more precise rendering than any in print.

The question that Bastiat deals with: how to tell when a law is unjust or when the law maker has become a source of law breaking? When the law becomes a means of plunder it has lost its character of genuine law. When the law enforcer is permitted to do with others’ lives and property what would be illegal if the citizens did them, the law becomes perverted.

Bastiat doesn’t avoid the difficult issues, such as why should we think that a democratic mandate can convert injustice to justice. He deals directly with the issue of the expanse of legislation:

It is not true that the mission of the law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our will, our education, our sentiments, our sentiments, our exchanges, our gifts, our enjoyments. Its mission is to prevent the rights of one from interfering with those of another, in any one of these things. Law, because it has force for its necessary sanction, can only have the domain of force, which is justice.

More from Bastiat's The Law:

Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State — then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion — then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.

How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain — prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion — should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the Socialist school, found their different theories upon one common hypothesis; and surely a more strange, a more presumptuous notion, could never have entered a human brain.

They divide mankind into two parts. Men in general, except one, form the first; the politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important.

Bastiat concludes his penetrating analysis with this:

The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun — reject all systems, and try of liberty — liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work.

This special Mises Institute edition is priced for the largest possible distribution. Whether you buy one or one hundred, you can look forward to one of the most penetrating and powerful essays written in the history of political economy.

Mises in One Lesson

The final of eight sessions in the Economics 101 series, this lecture may be the most concise overview of the core ideas of the Austrian School of Economics. [1:00:11] 

Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861

Recorded at the Mises Institute; May 1994 [50:16]

Contributions of James Mill: Leader of the Philisophical Radical Movement

Presented to the Austrian Economics Colloquium; February 9, 1990. [54:16]

Chicago Economics v. Austrian Economics

Recorded in 1971 [42:49]

Monetary Problems

Recorded June 23,1970. Special thanks to Bettina Bien Greaves for making this important recording available. [1:00:53]

Recollections from the University of Vienna

Presented at New York University in 1962. [37:43]

Socialism versus Free Market Exchange

Recorded at the University of Washington; May 2, 1970. [1:14:44]

The Future of Austrian Economics

Recorded at Mises University 1995 [59:25]

The Privatization of Roads and Highways

A panel discussion with Walter Block, sponsored by the Federalist Society, University of Tennessee College of Law, 26 January 2009. [1:37:00]