[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 11 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995). G.W.F. Hegel, unfortunately, was not a bizarre aberrant force in European thought. He was only one, if the most influential and the most convoluted and hypertrophic, of what must be considered the dominant paradigm of his age,
[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 12 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995). An MP3 audio file of this chapter, narrated by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .] There is no place in his system where Marx is fuzzier or shakier than at its base: the concept of historical materialism, the key
[ Excerpted from The Case Against The Fed .] By far the most secret and least accountable operation of the federal government is not, as one might expect, the CIA, DIA, or some other super-secret intelligence agency. The CIA and other intelligence operations are under control of the Congress. They are accountable: a Congressional committee
[ Originally published June 20, 2007. ] Enacted in the Importation Act of 1815, the Corn Laws were tariffs on various types of grain that shielded British agriculture, a sector dominated by powerful landowners, from foreign competition and forced consumers to pay higher prices. The duties created a classic case of the phenomenon of concentrated
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. This is demonstrably true; nor could it occur otherwise. The percentage of positively malignant, vicious, or depraved
[ Editor’s Note: This article was first published November 24, 2005. ] The US trade deficit is often viewed with alarm and has attracted considerable attention from both the public at large and policy makers. Much of the uneasiness about the US trade deficit can quite simply be attributed to the term “deficit” itself, which holds with it many
[ Originally published February 2007 .] It is hard to think of a slogan that nurtures anti–free market sentiment as strongly as the term “stabilization policy.” To Ludwig von Mises, stabilization policy was a direct consequence of the failure of government’s interventionism in the field of monetary affairs: Shortcomings in the governments’
[Originally published October 15, 2013.] There is a common assumption among politicians that voters want a lot of government services, but don’t want to pay for them. It’s certainly true that taxpayers don’t like paying taxes, and this is demonstrated in the fact that the federal government runs a deficit virtually every single year. If the
[ This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute’s conference on “The History of Liberty.” ] It is not an exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. For as Murray Rothbard wrote: “The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or
In Human Action Ludwig von Mises wrote that labor unions have always been the primary source of anti-capitalistic propaganda. I was reminded of this recently when I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming one of the bedrock tenets of unionism: “The Union Movement: The People Who Brought You the Weekend.” Well, not exactly. In the U.S. the average work
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.