Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Many people think that a universal basic income (UBI) would be a good substitute for the welfare state. Under this proposal, each person resident in a country would receive a guaranteed income, sufficient to live at a modest level. People would get the money unconditionally. Unlike
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. March 31 gave us a statement on the American Jobs Plan, and April 28 saw President Joe Biden speak on it to the American people (well, roughly 8 percent of the American people ). The goal of the law is the following : While the American Rescue Plan is changing the course of the pandemic
Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America? George F. Babbitt is novelist Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist in the novel of the same name. Babbitt is a real estate man, which is to say a salesman, but the newfangled 1920s term is “Realtor ™. “ Incurious, smug, self-satisfied, and utterly predictable, Babbitt is well pleased with his
The “transitory” inflation swamping the country has stubbornly persisted into July. Producer prices posted a second straight 1 percent month-over-month increase , which brought the full-year number to a record 7.8 percent. Twelve-month US export prices rose 17.2 percent, and nearly 22 percent if the rate of the first seven months of 2021 were
Some of you may know the name Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist who comes from a left-liberal background. He has been absolutely fearless and tireless on Twitter over the past eighteen months, documenting the overreach and folly of covid policy—and the mixed reality behind official assurances on everything from social
Holcombe (2004) has written an interesting and challenging but ultimately fallacious essay on government. In his view, this institution is “unnecessary, but inevitable.” I heartily agree with the former contention, but adamantly reject the latter. Worse is the implication for him of the supposed inevitability of the state: since it will come about
Samuel Clemens was an old-style liberal of the 19th century sort who believed in economic liberty and warned about the depredations of state power. The failure of many critics to understand the old liberal perspective may be part of the reason his political outlook is so widely misunderstood. His liberalism is woven into the fabric of his most
This paper, I examine aspects of Orwell’s political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four . I focus on the novel as an exploration of the logic of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy or managerial enterprise, a concept which was elaborated by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. I first provide a summary of
Steven B. Smith in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2021) gives us an excellent example of a fallacious way of arguing. Once we see how Smith, a Yale political science and philosophy professor who should know better, falls into this pattern, we will get a clear idea of what the fallacy is and how to avoid it. The
ABSTRACT: This essay aims to introduce the Austrian community to the metaphysical principles of political life first discovered by Aristotle and subsequently clarified by Thomas Aquinas. I begin by contrasting the Aristotelian perspective on social cooperation to that of mainstream post-Cartesian political philosophy with its emphasis on willful
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.