What is barbecue? If you ask ten people, you will get ten different answers. And if those ten people are in the same room when you ask them, you might have a fight on your hands. In Texas, barbecue is beef. In Tennessee and most of the rest of the South, it is pork. In North Carolina, the pork is pulled. In other places the pork is chopped or
[This article is based on remarks prepared for a panel on “What’s Wrong With the World?” at Rhodes College on September 29, 2009.] I assume that we all want to use the lives we’ve been given to make the world a better place. This isn’t as straightforward as it seems at first. It is insufficient merely to think globally; and depressingly many kinds
People have spilled a lot of ink both digital and real about the state of the world, kids these years, and the apparent moral and cultural poverty of modernity. We are facing, we are told, an economic crisis unlike anything we have experienced in our lifetimes, with this indicator or that indicator appearing in various outlets alongside the
[This article originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of the Freeman as “The Great Depression and World War II.” An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .] The current economic climate has a lot of people talking about the Great Depression. In particular, it has been said by people of divergent
How many times have you heard “capitalist” used as an epithet or a put-down? How many people do you know who use variations on “capitalism” to describe pretty much anything they don’t like? It’s a vice that cuts several ways. As the tea-party movement has risen to prominence, how often have you heard people denounce President Obama as a socialist?
[ Hamiltons Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — and What It Means for Americans Today • By Thomas DiLorenzo • Three Rivers, 2009 • 256 pages. This review originally appeared in the Freeman , February 24, 2010. An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .] The more
[ Pictures of the Socialistic Future • Eugen Richter • Trans. Henry Wright • LvMI, 2010 • 160 pages.] Socialists have generally tried to do two things: dethrone and kill God so that The People or The State might be exalted, and repeal the laws of economics. They seized the opportunity in the 20th century, denouncing God as the “opiate of the
[Forbes.com, August 2011] What do you do when life hands you lemons? If you’re about to say “make lemonade,” make sure you have a permit first or you might get an unwelcome visit from a government official. Last Saturday was Lemonade Freedom Day , which is a protest against governments shutting down — wait for it — kids’ lemonade stands. You’ve
“We have already had this conversation. The 20th century was a long (and bloody) debate about alternative modes of social organization.” Somewhere, there are two graduate students in the social sciences who need dissertation topics. Those students should be watching the Occupy Wall Street movement with keen eyes, because, as it evolves, it’s
A reader has brought to my attention the fact that the second graph in my Daily Article from 6/2 (”Public and Private Welfare Expenditures as Percentage of GDP and Gini Coefficient, 1980-1994”) suggests that private expenditure on welfare was 14% of GDP in 1994. This is clearly an error; there is still an upward trend, but the numbers have been
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.