The latest exploits of Lance Armstrong in this year’s Tour de France provide a solid backdrop for discussions contrasting the economic ideas of the Austrian School and the adherents of Public Choice. Public Choice is predicated on the belief that individual preferences can be known and quantified. From this simplistic view of Thymology, the Public
This year marks the 100 th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth. Her books sold in the millions and were most effective in transforming a generation of readers into ardent anti-communists and strong capitalists. There is also a connection between the Austrian School and Rand, as shown by a new symposium from The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Spring
[Address delivered before the Economics Faculty of New York University at the Faculty Club on November 20, 1940, a few months after Dr. and Mrs. Ludwig von Mises arrived in New Jersey on August 2, 1940, as refugees from war-torn Europe. Reprinted in Planning for Freedom .] Your kind invitation to address you on my contributions to economic theory
Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals. This concept of action contrasts to purely reflexive, or knee-jerk, behavior, which is not directed toward goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the
Ethics is the discipline, or what is called in classical philosophy the “science,” of what goals men should or should not pursue. All men have values and place positive or negative value judgments on goods, people, and events. Ethics is the discipline that provides standards for a moral critique of these value judgments. In the final analysis,
All the positivist procedures are based on the physical sciences. It is physics that knows or can know its “facts” and can test its conclusions against these facts, while being completely ignorant of its ultimate assumptions. In the sciences of human action, on the other hand, it is impossible to test conclusions. There is no laboratory where
Last year, the world economy grew by 5% , its fastest rate for many years, led by the extraordinary boom in China and very high growth in most other third world countries too. America and Japan also had fairly strong growth, although Western Europe had a more dismal performance. Can the good times last? Or is the world economy heading for a
[From a speech delivered on the campus of Walsh College] Like most others, I found myself very gratified by the attention given to Pope John II after his death, and not just because he wrote a very good encyclical on economics that warmly embraces free markets. Karol Wojtyla began adulthood as a simple priest who only sought to minister to others
[This paper was presented at the symposium on the Origins and Development of Property Rights, Institute of Humane Studies, University of San Francisco, January 1973. It was published in Reason Papers .] “The institution of property,” John Stuart Mill remarked, “when limited to its essential elements, consists in the recognition, in each person,
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by
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.