JEFF DEIST: One issue discussed recently at our Supporters Summit is whether we’re winning or losing. So two questions: Who is “we,” and are we winning? LEW ROCKWELL: Well, the “we,” fundamentally, is everybody who believes in civilization, who is opposed to what’s been going on ever since the French Revolution, when the Left came to total power
Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future Kirkpatrick Sale Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017 411 pages What attitude should supporters of the free market take toward decentralization? Should libertarians support the movement for Catalonian autonomy, for example, even if leaders of that movement are unfriendly
JEFF DEIST: What makes you optimistic, what makes you pessimistic about what you see in the US? RON PAUL: Well, if I look at the big picture including a long span of time, I would say conditions aren’t that bad, even though I often talk about all the bad things I anticipate and how it could get worse in terms of the economy and foreign policy.
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, 2018 To review Skin in the Game is a risky undertaking. The author has little use for book reviewers who, he tells us, “are bad middlemen. Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well-written they are; never in how they map the book (unless of
JEFF DEIST: Tom, you grew up in Boston. Your dad was a blue collar guy and also a Teamster. So, tell us a little bit about him and your childhood. TOM WOODS: He was a Teamster for 18 years, and worked as a forklift operator in a food warehouse for a grocery chain that no longer exists. I wouldn’t say he was a Reagan Democrat because he was never
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian Harvard University Press, 2018 x+381 pages Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Wellesley College, tells us that Globalists “is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against the World Trade organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that ... became
JEFF DEIST: How does a kid from New Jersey get interested in economics, much less decide to get a PhD? JOE SALERNO: Well, I didn’t really plan it. I think it all began back in fifth grade when my mother’s cousin visited from Italy, and during the course of conversation, he revealed that he was a member of the Italian Communist Party. My father,
[ 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
JEFF DEIST: You are German, but not from a big city in Germany. GUIDO HÜLSMANN: That’s correct, a small town. JD: Did your small-town upbringing influence your career and outlook? GH: I think so. The town where I went to high school in those years had the highest communist voter percentage in all of Western Germany. And this presence made itself
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl Princeton University Press, 2018 xii + 337 pages Radical Markets has at least one virtue. The book contains many unusual proposals, and I propose to concentrate on one of the strangest of these. Eric Posner, a legal scholar, and Glen Weyl, a
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.