We’ve lived through another election season, and this year, as with every years, the candidates competed to tell us about all the ways they were going to use the power of government to make our lives better. Unfortunately, many voters appeared quite sympathetic to the idea that government action can improve living standards and generally make
[ The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, and the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Press, 2018.] Niall Ferguson has impeccable credentials as a member of the “Establishment” (a word that comes, he tells us, from the historian A.J.P. Taylor). He has taught history at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and NYU and is also a
FedEx and UPS recently announced they will not ship the “Ghost Gunner,” a specific digital mill (like a 3D printer, but for metals) marketed as capable of fashioning parts without serial numbers. The present situation is: (1) buying, selling, owning, and using guns without serial numbers is legal, even supposed “assault” rifles; (2) both FedEx and
[This interview with Jeff Deist and Hans Hoppe will appear in the upcoming issue of The Austrian (March–April 2020).] JEFF DEIST: Your recent talk in Vienna mentioned growing up happy but poor, the son of East German parents who had been driven west during the Cold War by the Soviets. Can you elaborate on the lasting impact their experience had on
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.