[ A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002)] “William Jennings Bryan and his pietist coalition seized control of the Democratic Party at the momentous convention of 1896. The Democratic Party was never to be the same again.” Orthodox economic historians attribute the triumph of William Jennings Bryan in the Democratic convention
[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)] One of the most powerful influences in the legal and political thought and institutions of the Christian West during the Middle Ages was the Roman law, derived from the republic and empire of ancient Rome. Roman law classically developed in the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD.
[ From the Libertarian Forum , June 1971] New Yorkers have recently had to suffer yet another irresponsible blackjacking at the hands of power-drunk labor unions. This time it was the bridge tenders and garbage-incinerator workers who, angered at the state legislature’s balking at their receiving pensions that no private industry could afford,
In their 1995 book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, David Card and Alan Krueger argued that increases in the minimum wage in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the early 1990s not only did not lead to unemployment, as classical economic theory would predict, but actually coincided with an increase in employment. As it
David Frum recently accused modern Hayekians of not having a policy response to the recent economic crisis. According to Frum, Keynesians have the solutions that people want: namely, activist policies to restore demand and employment. Hayekians allegedly rail against the straw man of central planning. There are two problems with Frum’s argument.
[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Colin Hussey, is available for download .] Every once in a while, something comes along that perfectly encapsulates the idea of so-called “social justice” in action. For all the wonderful critiques that have been written about this wretched concept by its many detractors, none quite match the elegant
“The notion that ‘Mother Earth’ would ever have cause to complain of its treatment at the hands of humans is pure mysticism.” I’ll bet you forgot to buy a card and gift, didn’t you? Boy, is your face red! Did you even know it’s International Mother Earth Day today, citizen? Socialist despot Evo Morales and his buddies at the United Nations sure
Mathematics can sometimes make smart people dumb. Let me explain what I mean by this. I don’t mean that it is dumb not to be good at mathematics. After all, mathematics is a highly abstract and challenging discipline requiring many years (decades even) of study, and there are plenty of very smart people who have little understanding of it, and
On June 3, 2011, 73-year-old Carey Dyess went on a shooting rampage in Yuma, Arizona. By the time the gunfire had stopped, 5 people lay dead, including the gunman. Almost exactly five months earlier, 23-year-old Jared Loughner had shot 6 people dead and wounded 13 more 240 miles east of Yuma in Tucson, Arizona. Among the wounded was Congresswoman
I recently discussed David Frum’s lament that conservative Republicans are defecting from “respectable” economists and joining the ranks of the Austrians. One of the reasons for this is that many conservative pundits — Frum included — are Keynesians, plain and simple. Many rank-and-file conservatives are recognizing that it makes no sense to
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.