Ever since the release of Google+, I’ve been thinking through what Google had to go through to match and improve on Facebook. People think that geekery is all about code but there is serious intellectual work that precedes the code that is just as hard. Google had to figure out what they did wrong with Buzz (as I explained ) but also figure out
This lecture is fantastic, really. Professor Kors draws heavily from Mises himself. Watch the video here Socialism’s Legacy – Alan Charles Kors from Clemson Institute on Vimeo .
I have some vague sense that many people are opposed to capital punishment, and for good reason, and especially when there is no trial and conviction, and yet we are expected uncritically to celebrate the death of Bin Laden at the hands of the U.S. state. The government needs glory and we are supposed to provide it, regardless of the cost (which,
Warner Brothers didn’t initially respond well to the Marx Brothers’ desire to make a movie called “A Night in Casablanca.” Groucho wrote a great letter poking fun at the very idea that Warner could presume ownership over an idea. Here is the blog that alerted me to this letter and here is the letter
“Surely the history of money has made sufficiently clear the dangers and evils of irredeemable paper, the fundamental disorganization and demoralization that such paper can occasion, to make argument with reference to the essential importance of the preservation of the gold standard unnecessary.” So said Benjamin Anderson in his 1919 book The
It’s good to see the birthday of fiat money getting attention today. Mises.org covers it, and LRC too. Lewis Lehrman offers a fascinating story of the Camp David meeting where the gold window was shut and where a handful of Nixon aides decided to impose wage and price controls at the same time. Very chilling material here. I’m particularly
I really wanted to love Inside Job , the film that won the Academy award this year for best documentary. And it is a great film, but to see it that way you have to turn your brain “off” even as you push the “on” button on your DVD clicker. The interviews are personal and interesting. The footage of Wall Street and the offices of big players in the
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.