The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It
“Alienation,” to Marx, bears no relation to the fashionable prattle of late-20th-century Marxoid intellectuals. It did not mean a psychological feeling, of anxiety or estrangement, which could somehow be blamed on capitalism, or on cultural or sexual “repression.” Alienation, for Marx, was far more fundamental, more cosmic. It meant, at the very
[This essay is taken from chapter 19 of Spencer’s first major work of political philosophy— Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed (1851)—in which his first principle is equal liberty: “that every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. I. Warning against Fiduciary Media Early in the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises warned against the consequences of granting the government control over the money supply. Such a regime inevitably creates money through bank credit that is not backed by real savings—a type of money that Mises
Governments can pay their bills in three ways: taxes, debt, and inflation. The public usually recognizes the first two, for they are difficult to hide. But the third tends to go unnoticed by the public because it involves a slow and subtle reduction in the value of money, a policy usually unarticulated and complex in design. In this article, I
In a money economy, the money commodity is on one side of every transaction, and hence reduces the number of relevant prices. The direct exchange ratio between any two commodities can easily be computed from their respective money prices. The “price” or purchasing power of money is the array of goods and services for which a unit of money can be
[This article originally appeared in the Austrian Economics Newsletter , Summer 1991, pp. 1–6. You read can also read it in PDF .] Today regulation is generally recognized as a mechanism by which special interests lobby the government to create barriers to entry or other special privileges. Research has shown, for example, that the Civil
Much has been written about the famous debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the constitutionality of America’s first central bank, the Bank of the United States (BUS). This was where Jefferson, as secretary of state, enunciated his “strict constructionist” view of the Constitution, making his case to President George
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Is gold money? Many would say so, and a web search returns tens of thousands of additional affirmative responses. If you want to start a fight with a gold bug , take the opposite view. But is it so? To answer the question of whether gold is money requires a definition. This one, from
Top professional athletes regularly sign multi-million dollar contracts, with signing bonuses and lucrative product promotion deals. Why do professional athletes make so much more money than, say, professional teachers? Do people really value sports more than they value education? Teachers provide a service that is generally accepted as
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.